Apple is reportedly prepping a search service of its own to rival the likes of Google and Yahoo.
But could a search service launched by Apple actually take on the likes of Google, the clear dominant force in search?
The search industry has changed a lot over the past few years, with the mobile revolution changing how search companies need to treat their services. Despite this, Google has maintained a clear lead in search, with Android obviously using Google by default, and those on iOS doing the same until just recently.
"As Siri gets better, and more people interact with their smartphones via voice, Apple sees an opportunity to leverage its control of this gateway into the fat revenue streams behind it," said Cesar Brea, author of Marketing and Sales Analytics and founder of Force Five Partners, in an email with Tech Times.
Apple sold tens of millions of iPhone 6's, selling a whopping 10 million in only a week after the device was released in October. If Apple were to change the default search engine to its own in Safari on iOS and OS X, it is likely that millions of people would use it straight away without feeling the need to change back to Google.
The change of the default search engine in a web browser has had a big effect on Google in the past. Mozilla recently changed the default search engine in Firefox from Google to Yahoo, shifting Yahoo's market share from 10.4 percent to 10.9 percent.
Despite this, the effects were minimal, with 64 percent of users sticking with Google as their search engine.
Some suggest that Apple should stick to its guns and not attempt a search engine.
"Apple trying to do search as well as Google will end up like Google trying to do devices as well as Apple. There are precedents for this likely fail: have we forgotten what happened when Apple tried to substitute its maps app for Google's on iOS 6?"
Could Apple take down Google with a new search engine? Not in the near future. Even if the search engine were to be successful on Apple devices, smartphones running iOS only accounted for 11.7 percent of the global smartphone market in the third quarter of 2014 and computers running OS X only accounted for 7.11 percent of the global computer operating system market share. Apple's reach would be minimal at best, and while it might take chunk of users from Google, it certainly would not prove to be a "Google killer."
