Key Staff Driving Apple Search Engine Leave To Rejoin Google

Four years after Laserlike was acquired by Apple to boost its web search technology, the founders have quit to rejoin Google. AppleInsider reports: Prior to forming Laserlike in 2015, Anand Shukla, Srinivasan Venkatachary and Steven Baker were all Google employees. Their work at Apple is one reason the company has been predicted to launch its own search engine equivalent to Google's. Apple acquired Laserlike in 2018, though the deal wasn't made public until the following year. As part of the acquisition, the company's three founders were, and ultimately they led a 200-strong search team at Apple.

According to The Information, Srinivasan Venkatachary has now returned to Google. He is reportedly the company's new vice president of engineering. Venkatachary reports to James Manyika, senior vice president of technology and society. Baker and Shukla now both work on Manyika's team. It's not known whether all three quit Apple at the same time, or whether Venkatachary is just the latest to move. According to The Information's source, Apple is estimated to be about four years away from launching a Google Search rival.

Yeah, 4 years

[Big Hairy Gorilla]

1 week of software is like a year in any other place. I would never put a date on software. Oh, well, we delivered it, but we didn't really say it worked.

Too bad

[TwistedGreen]

Too bad, there are really only two search engines now... Google and Bing. We could use more competition in the search space.

Re: Too bad

[S_Stout]

What about Altavista?

Re:

[EreIamJH]

After all these years it's still my favourite. Especially the simple search syntax .

Re:

[TwistedGreen]

Yahoo Search is just rebranded Bing now, unfortunately.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Too bad

[TwistedGreen]

It's what's used behind every non-Google search engine, like Yahoo Search or DuckDuckGo...

Re:

[Luckyo]

Lycos? Yandex? Baidu?

Re:

[TwistedGreen]

Oh yeah forgot about Lycos. Wow, Tripod and Angelfire still exist?

Re:

[Luckyo]

It's kind of like some people outside anglosphere sometimes forget google exists. Baidu's what, #6 most visited page in the world?

Privacy?

[SleepingEye]

Or was the just bullshit. Might as well buy out DDG, their search results are crap compared. And this is me being lazy leaving DDG as the default search requiring extra work to switch to Google. and I do it every. single. time.

Re:Privacy?

[guest reader]

My preference is to use the DuckDuckGo search engine rather than Google. It is protecting searchers' privacy and it uses compilation of "over 400" sources, not just Bing. It is possible to set it as default search engine in Edge, Firefox, or in Chrome.

DuckDuckGo (DDG) is an internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results.

Because of its anonymity, it is impossible to know how many people use DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Re: Privacy?

[ArmoredDragon]

Even if it did use 400 sources, if they're all shit to begin with, then combining them into one doesn't give you something better, instead you just have a pile of shit.

Re: Privacy?

[jemmyw]

I'm going to shout out kagi.com a paid search engine I've been using for about 6 months. It started out slower than DDG but the results seemed better. It has steadily improved in performance. They have their own index for non commercial content as well as using bing and Google, so you get an interesting mix. The best thing for me is that it seems to actually bubble up sites relevant to my country whereas other engines only work well if I add the country identifier, which then constrains the results rather t

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

> and I do it every. single. time.

What are you searching for? My experience is once a month or two.

Google does better when searching for log output errors, for instance.

For everything else Brave Search is mostly good enough or DDG.

No need to launch a Google Search rival

[ayesnymous]

when Google is paying you tens of billions of dollars every year to be the default search engine on the iPhone.

Re:

[Paradise Pete]

when Google is paying you tens of billions of dollars every year to be the default search engine on the iPhone.

Maybe that's why they have a search team, to keep that sweet google money flowing. "The threat is often stronger than the execution" - Nimzowitsch

"Driving A Search Engine"

[greytree]

Yes, because it really is an engine, with wheels. They used to drive it runs the staff car park to test it.

But then they crashed it into the CEO's truck.
Which is why they're leaving Apple and going to drive Google's engine instead.

Cortana here we come!

[Jeslijar]

I can't wait for apple's search results on their phones and laptops to start web searches too, so all my search data can be sent back to be sold by big mac.