This is all about the money. It’s already been reported that Google will pay Apple $3 billion this year, up from last year.
I don't think so Mel.
There was an analyst mentioned here at AI in an article guessing that Google might have to pay as much as $3B to secure rights. There was no one claiming it as fact to the best of my knowledge.
Let's assume that it is true that Google pays apple 3 billion a year. In 2014 the paid 1 billion. So of the 12 billion increase 2 billion would be from Google. Let's say the rest is from apps, music etc (10 billion).
Now those 2 billion are pure profit for apple.
Those remaining 10 billion have some cost especially music licensing etc. So lets say 50 percent is cost. Then the extra profit from services would be 5 billion.
So it's interesting that a significant part of profit increase might be coming from Google payments.
This is all about the money. It’s already been reported that Google will pay Apple $3 billion this year, up from last year.
I don't think so Mel.
There was an analyst mentioned here at AI in an article guessing that Google might have to pay as much as $3B to secure rights. There was no one claiming it as fact to the best of my knowledge.
You are right.
Apple probably has to pay Google for the priveldge to use Google search.
Google keeps winning and Apple keeps losing. Am i right?
Huh??
What no quotes and links to back that 'Huh??' up from your overlords?
It's about time Apple created their own search engine IMHO. Apple could do it for the good of their users not to exploit them.
I don’t think so. For Apple to have any hope of competing, they would have to make up for two decades of R&D. Yes, they could get a jump start because they know, in general, what works now. But it would cost billions to just get going. Maps costs them billions a year.
and who would use this other than Apple users? Really? Then they would have to contend with China and other regimes like that. How would they manage the privacy concerns? What about advertising? They would have to have that for participating companies, and websites.
it would be a nightmare for them.
I hear you but then again I recall similar thoughts expressed about Apple entering mapping too before they did. There is always DuckDuckGo to be bought and improved upon. As to who would use it... well the Apple users as they do Maps. It also has the advantage of screwing with Google. /(evil chuckle)
The point I’m trying to make is that maps is actually easier than search. For one thing, at this point in time, search needs to come out fully formed like Athena from Zeuz’s head. But mapping can be additive over time, while still being useful while that happens.
This is all about the money. It’s already been reported that Google will pay Apple $3 billion this year, up from last year.
I don't think so Mel.
There was an analyst mentioned here at AI in an article guessing that Google might have to pay as much as $3B to secure rights. There was no one claiming it as fact to the best of my knowledge.
You are right.
Apple probably has to pay Google for the priveldge to use Google search.
Google keeps winning and Apple keeps losing. Am i right?
Huh??
What no quotes and links to back that 'Huh??' up from your overlords?
So you got nothing either.:-)
I don’t know what either of you kids have, but others in the computer reporting world have been saying that this number looks very close to what they expect. So, while maybe I was too fast in saying it was official, it seems as though it’s agreed to be pretty accurate. And I’m not surprised, as Google says, in their quarterly reports, which are official, that they get at least 50% of their mobile revenue from iOS. That number has been increasing. So it’s not surprising to read that the payments are rising substantially.
This is all about the money. It’s already been reported that Google will pay Apple $3 billion this year, up from last year.
Hmm, that’s about three times what Google paid for some bodies over at HTC...
It's true HTC is pretty big but Google willing to pay that much because they can't afford to lose Apple or rather iDevice consumers. I suspect it's not only money that Apple consider but also the quality of the service. As long as Google play by Apple's rule (especially regarding ads and privacy), there is no reason not to use Google as their main search engine instead of Bing. It's not like Apple being small minded here.
I'm sure MS Bing service contract was up for renew, highest offer wins, and Google must of out paid what MS was offering. My Default is still DuckDuckGo for my searches at least as much as possible. That's my default on my iOS devices. Maybe I should double check again.
As for Siri, it works quite well for me. Apple is always working on it behind the scenes.
Here's one oddity that iOs users might not expect: If you change the search default in Safari you might assume that it would also change for Siri and Spotlight. Unless something changes that is not the case. Google will remain the Siri and Spotlight default even if you prefer to use DuckDuckGo for example and have it set as your default. But you can specify a provider by command each time you invoke a Siri web search.
Siri and spotlight are not an issue since we know that data is first passed through an Apple server and Apple anonymizes the information so Google does not really know who you are.
It's about time Apple created their own search engine IMHO. Apple could do it for the good of their users not to exploit them.
I dunno. Have you compared Apple's maps app to Google's lately? It would be fun to see what Apple could do with it, but I wouldn't be particularly confident in Apple's ability to make their own search engine better than Google's.
This is all about the money. It’s already been reported that Google will pay Apple $3 billion this year, up from last year.
I don't think so Mel.
There was an analyst mentioned here at AI in an article guessing that Google might have to pay as much as $3B to secure rights. There was no one claiming it as fact to the best of my knowledge.
You are right.
Apple probably has to pay Google for the priveldge to use Google search.
Google keeps winning and Apple keeps losing. Am i right?
Huh??
What no quotes and links to back that 'Huh??' up from your overlords?
So you got nothing either.:-)
Just alter your expectations to make the default NOT assuming that reading comprehension and critical thinking will be applied. Preconceptions, erroneous conclusions caused by skimming, and flawed logic are the new normal.
If you can figure out a way to get someone to pay you for changing your default, please let me know.
It's about time Apple created their own search engine IMHO. Apple could do it for the good of their users not to exploit them.
I dunno. Have you compared Apple's maps app to Google's lately? It would be fun to see what Apple could do with it, but I wouldn't be particularly confident in Apple's ability to make their own search engine better than Google's.
Geographical maps are a little different because that's mapping the real world into digital. Google's search engine will actually help make their maps more accurate because new addresses will be posted to websites. Internet search is digital to digital. To map out the internet, you just visit every web page and download the text on the site. A typical HTML page is about 60KB (images, CSS, Javascript etc are separate):
There are ~1 billion websites, say they average 50 pages per site (forums have way more pages but most sites are just information) = 1b * 50 * 60KB = 3 petabyte of data uncompressed. This is just acquisition data, they need to keep versioned data, which will run into exabytes (1EB = 1 million 1TB HDDs).
That's with all the HTML tags and full content. The indexer would strip that out and look for unique terms and links and just associate that with the URL.
If a web page takes under 5 seconds to load, visiting 50 billion web pages would take 250b seconds = 2.8 million days. That's if you visit them sequentially. They would be loaded in parallel. If Apple had 1,000 servers indexing 1,000 pages each at a time (~480Gbit/s bandwidth), they could index the entire internet in under 3 days. It would need a data center to do it because of the bandwidth requirements, Google has at least 1 petabit/s bandwidth:
The difficult parts are the connection between what the search engine user tells it they want and what the search engine thinks they actually want and managing the scale of the data index and search volume.
They'd need to have an efficient mapping system. Google uses PageRank and other algorithms to determine site popularity:
For every page indexed, the indexer notes links on the page and increments the popularity of that link in the index. The more inbound links a page has, the more popular it is and that gives it a high reputation. There are other factors like whether the page content matches the title, whether it's selling products or it's just information.
You can see an example what a search engine sees using the terminal on the Mac. The following will download Wikipedia's homepage to the desktop as text:
From that, the indexer would parse all the text and get the links, then visit the links and so on until all the pages online are done.
Once the indexing is complete, they'd have a ranking of most popular sites and associations with each page's terms.
When a user submits a search, the engine determines the meaning in their search like how Siri works. Those terms are used to look up the index and the most popular sites that fit the search get delivered.
This is where search engines fail badly in certain contexts because something being popular doesn't mean it's right. When you do searches for technical questions, the results are sometimes not the answer but popular sites showing the same unanswered question.
There needs to be intelligent analysis of the content to determine the nature of it, whether it's an opinion, a question, an answer, a historical fact, a peer-reviewed scientific paper and so on. This works better knowing the people who wrote the content too, which is a privacy issue.
Apple has been running Siri for a while and although they feed the data into 3rd party search engines, they wouldn't be starting from nothing. To match or exceed Google they can build up an index and run queries from Siri through both their own engine and Google and compare the results. If their results are worse then they need to improve their index.
It's obviously not just a matter of having enough resources as Microsoft has the resources and hasn't made a better engine than Google. When asked about Apple's engine switch, Microsoft said:
"We value our relationship with Apple and look forward to continuing to partner with them in many ways, including on Bing Image Search in Siri, to provide the best experience possible for our customers. Bing has grown every year since its launch, now powering over a third of all the PC search volume in the U.S., and continues to grow worldwide. It also powers the search experiences of many other partners, including Yahoo (Verizon), AOL and Amazon, as well as the multi-lingual abilities of Twitter. As we move forward, given our work to advance the field of AI, we’re confident that Bing will be at the forefront of providing a more intelligent search experience for our customers and partners."
Microsoft has managed to gain a decent marketshare and they see AI making their search better than competitors in future. The more that the indexer can understand the content, the better the results are. This is where engines like Yandex (Russia) and Baidu (China) sometimes work better as they have a better understanding of their own language and culture (although Google gets blocked to varying degrees so that doesn't help):
Having a high volume of users helps search engines so unpopular ones are already at a disadvantage because they can't see what lots of people are looking for. They need to get the users on the platform first and Apple has an advantage with their install base. Getting the data for the index is fairly trivial. Building an index intelligently is hard. I don't think Google has this part done as well as it could be even if it's better than anyone else, their main strength seems to be more from having the marketshare and reacting to user data.
Apple doesn't need to go all in with a search engine, they can build it up. They can be returning some results from their own engine in much the same way DuckDuckGo gets data from multiple sources and how Siri uses partner services like Yelp. It's not something that just gets switched on, it has to evolve.
Whether Apple wants to build and maintain a search engine is another matter. They'd have to take down millions of copyright links all the time and handling exabytes of private data is tough (per-user encryption is easier than pooling data together). Ultimately their motive would be to improve on what's already there but there aren't many people dissatisfied with Google search so it's not even so much that they couldn't improve on it, at least in some areas, I don't think there's much incentive for them.
It's about time Apple created their own search engine IMHO. Apple could do it for the good of their users not to exploit them.
I dunno. Have you compared Apple's maps app to Google's lately? It would be fun to see what Apple could do with it, but I wouldn't be particularly confident in Apple's ability to make their own search engine better than Google's.
Here's one oddity that iOs users might not expect: If you change the search default in Safari you might assume that it would also change for Siri and Spotlight. Unless something changes that is not the case. Google will remain the Siri and Spotlight default even if you prefer to use DuckDuckGo for example and have it set as your default. But you can specify a provider by command each time you invoke a Siri web search.
Siri and spotlight are not an issue since we know that data is first passed through an Apple server and Apple anonymizes the information so Google does not really know who you are.
Thank you, I was wondering if that was the case.
I don't see Apple ever* building its own full search engine a la google, yahoo, bing, ddg. There's too much bad and controversial stuff on there, e.g. terrorism (google, to their shame, is failing at stopping terrorist propaganda), porn, how to commit suicide, racism, etc.
I think Apple can keep providing an improved experience by adding to Siri/spotlight search (as Marvin seems to be saying), and make general web search gradually more and more unnecessary.
*At least not for the next 10-20 years at least, which I'm (wildly) guessing is how long it's going to be before Apple could create a great search engine that blocked out nearly all the 'bad' stuff; while still making the other search engines available.
It's about time Apple created their own search engine IMHO. Apple could do it for the good of their users not to exploit them.
I dunno. Have you compared Apple's maps app to Google's lately? It would be fun to see what Apple could do with it, but I wouldn't be particularly confident in Apple's ability to make their own search engine better than Google's.
Given that it takes a lot of mining and categorizing to make a search that good, Apple won't go that far, not because they can't, but because customer privacy (so far, at least) has been a concern for Apple....not so much for Google, though.
It's about time Apple created their own search engine IMHO. Apple could do it for the good of their users not to exploit them.
I dunno. Have you compared Apple's maps app to Google's lately? It would be fun to see what Apple could do with it, but I wouldn't be particularly confident in Apple's ability to make their own search engine better than Google's.
Geographical maps are a little different because that's mapping the real world into digital. Google's search engine will actually help make their maps more accurate because new addresses will be posted to websites. Internet search is digital to digital. To map out the internet, you just visit every web page and download the text on the site. A typical HTML page is about 60KB (images, CSS, Javascript etc are separate):
There are ~1 billion websites, say they average 50 pages per site (forums have way more pages but most sites are just information) = 1b * 50 * 60KB = 3 petabyte of data uncompressed. This is just acquisition data, they need to keep versioned data, which will run into exabytes (1EB = 1 million 1TB HDDs).
That's with all the HTML tags and full content. The indexer would strip that out and look for unique terms and links and just associate that with the URL.
If a web page takes under 5 seconds to load, visiting 50 billion web pages would take 250b seconds = 2.8 million days. That's if you visit them sequentially. They would be loaded in parallel. If Apple had 1,000 servers indexing 1,000 pages each at a time (~480Gbit/s bandwidth), they could index the entire internet in under 3 days. It would need a data center to do it because of the bandwidth requirements, Google has at least 1 petabit/s bandwidth:
The difficult parts are the connection between what the search engine user tells it they want and what the search engine thinks they actually want and managing the scale of the data index and search volume.
They'd need to have an efficient mapping system. Google uses PageRank and other algorithms to determine site popularity:
For every page indexed, the indexer notes links on the page and increments the popularity of that link in the index. The more inbound links a page has, the more popular it is and that gives it a high reputation. There are other factors like whether the page content matches the title, whether it's selling products or it's just information.
You can see an example what a search engine sees using the terminal on the Mac. The following will download Wikipedia's homepage to the desktop as text:
From that, the indexer would parse all the text and get the links, then visit the links and so on until all the pages online are done.
Once the indexing is complete, they'd have a ranking of most popular sites and associations with each page's terms.
When a user submits a search, the engine determines the meaning in their search like how Siri works. Those terms are used to look up the index and the most popular sites that fit the search get delivered.
This is where search engines fail badly in certain contexts because something being popular doesn't mean it's right. When you do searches for technical questions, the results are sometimes not the answer but popular sites showing the same unanswered question.
There needs to be intelligent analysis of the content to determine the nature of it, whether it's an opinion, a question, an answer, a historical fact, a peer-reviewed scientific paper and so on. This works better knowing the people who wrote the content too, which is a privacy issue.
Apple has been running Siri for a while and although they feed the data into 3rd party search engines, they wouldn't be starting from nothing. To match or exceed Google they can build up an index and run queries from Siri through both their own engine and Google and compare the results. If their results are worse then they need to improve their index.
It's obviously not just a matter of having enough resources as Microsoft has the resources and hasn't made a better engine than Google. When asked about Apple's engine switch, Microsoft said:
"We value our relationship with Apple and look forward to continuing to partner with them in many ways, including on Bing Image Search in Siri, to provide the best experience possible for our customers. Bing has grown every year since its launch, now powering over a third of all the PC search volume in the U.S., and continues to grow worldwide. It also powers the search experiences of many other partners, including Yahoo (Verizon), AOL and Amazon, as well as the multi-lingual abilities of Twitter. As we move forward, given our work to advance the field of AI, we’re confident that Bing will be at the forefront of providing a more intelligent search experience for our customers and partners."
Microsoft has managed to gain a decent marketshare and they see AI making their search better than competitors in future. The more that the indexer can understand the content, the better the results are. This is where engines like Yandex (Russia) and Baidu (China) sometimes work better as they have a better understanding of their own language and culture (although Google gets blocked to varying degrees so that doesn't help):
Having a high volume of users helps search engines so unpopular ones are already at a disadvantage because they can't see what lots of people are looking for. They need to get the users on the platform first and Apple has an advantage with their install base. Getting the data for the index is fairly trivial. Building an index intelligently is hard. I don't think Google has this part done as well as it could be even if it's better than anyone else, their main strength seems to be more from having the marketshare and reacting to user data.
Apple doesn't need to go all in with a search engine, they can build it up. They can be returning some results from their own engine in much the same way DuckDuckGo gets data from multiple sources and how Siri uses partner services like Yelp. It's not something that just gets switched on, it has to evolve.
Whether Apple wants to build and maintain a search engine is another matter. They'd have to take down millions of copyright links all the time and handling exabytes of private data is tough (per-user encryption is easier than pooling data together). Ultimately their motive would be to improve on what's already there but there aren't many people dissatisfied with Google search so it's not even so much that they couldn't improve on it, at least in some areas, I don't think there's much incentive for them.
Of course, as we know, ranking isn’t that straightforward. They bias the search towards paid results. They bias the search towards their own properties. They also manually bias the search towards what they think is trending, and they cut links to sites they don’t “like”.
It's about time Apple created their own search engine IMHO. Apple could do it for the good of their users not to exploit them.
I dunno. Have you compared Apple's maps app to Google's lately? It would be fun to see what Apple could do with it, but I wouldn't be particularly confident in Apple's ability to make their own search engine better than Google's.
Geographical maps are a little different because that's mapping the real world into digital. Google's search engine will actually help make their maps more accurate because new addresses will be posted to websites. Internet search is digital to digital. To map out the internet, you just visit every web page and download the text on the site. A typical HTML page is about 60KB (images, CSS, Javascript etc are separate):
There are ~1 billion websites, say they average 50 pages per site (forums have way more pages but most sites are just information) = 1b * 50 * 60KB = 3 petabyte of data uncompressed. This is just acquisition data, they need to keep versioned data, which will run into exabytes (1EB = 1 million 1TB HDDs).
That's with all the HTML tags and full content. The indexer would strip that out and look for unique terms and links and just associate that with the URL.
If a web page takes under 5 seconds to load, visiting 50 billion web pages would take 250b seconds = 2.8 million days. That's if you visit them sequentially. They would be loaded in parallel. If Apple had 1,000 servers indexing 1,000 pages each at a time (~480Gbit/s bandwidth), they could index the entire internet in under 3 days. It would need a data center to do it because of the bandwidth requirements, Google has at least 1 petabit/s bandwidth:
The difficult parts are the connection between what the search engine user tells it they want and what the search engine thinks they actually want and managing the scale of the data index and search volume.
They'd need to have an efficient mapping system. Google uses PageRank and other algorithms to determine site popularity:
For every page indexed, the indexer notes links on the page and increments the popularity of that link in the index. The more inbound links a page has, the more popular it is and that gives it a high reputation. There are other factors like whether the page content matches the title, whether it's selling products or it's just information.
You can see an example what a search engine sees using the terminal on the Mac. The following will download Wikipedia's homepage to the desktop as text:
From that, the indexer would parse all the text and get the links, then visit the links and so on until all the pages online are done.
Once the indexing is complete, they'd have a ranking of most popular sites and associations with each page's terms.
When a user submits a search, the engine determines the meaning in their search like how Siri works. Those terms are used to look up the index and the most popular sites that fit the search get delivered.
This is where search engines fail badly in certain contexts because something being popular doesn't mean it's right. When you do searches for technical questions, the results are sometimes not the answer but popular sites showing the same unanswered question.
There needs to be intelligent analysis of the content to determine the nature of it, whether it's an opinion, a question, an answer, a historical fact, a peer-reviewed scientific paper and so on. This works better knowing the people who wrote the content too, which is a privacy issue.
Apple has been running Siri for a while and although they feed the data into 3rd party search engines, they wouldn't be starting from nothing. To match or exceed Google they can build up an index and run queries from Siri through both their own engine and Google and compare the results. If their results are worse then they need to improve their index.
It's obviously not just a matter of having enough resources as Microsoft has the resources and hasn't made a better engine than Google. When asked about Apple's engine switch, Microsoft said:
"We value our relationship with Apple and look forward to continuing to partner with them in many ways, including on Bing Image Search in Siri, to provide the best experience possible for our customers. Bing has grown every year since its launch, now powering over a third of all the PC search volume in the U.S., and continues to grow worldwide. It also powers the search experiences of many other partners, including Yahoo (Verizon), AOL and Amazon, as well as the multi-lingual abilities of Twitter. As we move forward, given our work to advance the field of AI, we’re confident that Bing will be at the forefront of providing a more intelligent search experience for our customers and partners."
Microsoft has managed to gain a decent marketshare and they see AI making their search better than competitors in future. The more that the indexer can understand the content, the better the results are. This is where engines like Yandex (Russia) and Baidu (China) sometimes work better as they have a better understanding of their own language and culture (although Google gets blocked to varying degrees so that doesn't help):
Having a high volume of users helps search engines so unpopular ones are already at a disadvantage because they can't see what lots of people are looking for. They need to get the users on the platform first and Apple has an advantage with their install base. Getting the data for the index is fairly trivial. Building an index intelligently is hard. I don't think Google has this part done as well as it could be even if it's better than anyone else, their main strength seems to be more from having the marketshare and reacting to user data.
Apple doesn't need to go all in with a search engine, they can build it up. They can be returning some results from their own engine in much the same way DuckDuckGo gets data from multiple sources and how Siri uses partner services like Yelp. It's not something that just gets switched on, it has to evolve.
Whether Apple wants to build and maintain a search engine is another matter. They'd have to take down millions of copyright links all the time and handling exabytes of private data is tough (per-user encryption is easier than pooling data together). Ultimately their motive would be to improve on what's already there but there aren't many people dissatisfied with Google search so it's not even so much that they couldn't improve on it, at least in some areas, I don't think there's much incentive for them.
Of course, as we know, ranking isn’t that straightforward. They bias the search towards paid results. They bias the search towards their own properties. They also manually bias the search towards what they think is trending, and they cut links to sites they don’t “like”.
Comments
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/14/google-paying-apple-3-billion-to-remain-default-search--bernstein.html
I think the more interesting info that I got from that article was that the Google payments are counted as part of service revenue for apple.
Service revenue was at an annual run-rate of about 16 billion in 2014 and 28 billion now.
http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/17/02/01/see-how-apples-services-revenue-has-grown-steadily-amid-changes-in-other-business-segments
So that's an annual increase of 12 billion.
Let's assume that it is true that Google pays apple 3 billion a year. In 2014 the paid 1 billion. So of the 12 billion increase 2 billion would be from Google. Let's say the rest is from apps, music etc (10 billion).
Now those 2 billion are pure profit for apple.
Those remaining 10 billion have some cost especially music licensing etc. So lets say 50 percent is cost. Then the extra profit from services would be 5 billion.
So it's interesting that a significant part of profit increase might be coming from Google payments.
I don’t know what either of you kids have, but others in the computer reporting world have been saying that this number looks very close to what they expect. So, while maybe I was too fast in saying it was official, it seems as though it’s agreed to be pretty accurate. And I’m not surprised, as Google says, in their quarterly reports, which are official, that they get at least 50% of their mobile revenue from iOS. That number has been increasing. So it’s not surprising to read that the payments are rising substantially.
If you can figure out a way to get someone to pay you for changing your default, please let me know.
https://gigaom.com/2014/12/29/the-overweight-web-average-web-page-size-is-up-15-in-2014/
There are ~1 billion websites, say they average 50 pages per site (forums have way more pages but most sites are just information) = 1b * 50 * 60KB = 3 petabyte of data uncompressed. This is just acquisition data, they need to keep versioned data, which will run into exabytes (1EB = 1 million 1TB HDDs).
That's with all the HTML tags and full content. The indexer would strip that out and look for unique terms and links and just associate that with the URL.
If a web page takes under 5 seconds to load, visiting 50 billion web pages would take 250b seconds = 2.8 million days. That's if you visit them sequentially. They would be loaded in parallel. If Apple had 1,000 servers indexing 1,000 pages each at a time (~480Gbit/s bandwidth), they could index the entire internet in under 3 days. It would need a data center to do it because of the bandwidth requirements, Google has at least 1 petabit/s bandwidth:
https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/18/how-googles-networking-infrastructure-has-evolved-over-the-last-10-years/
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/06/A-Look-Inside-Googles-Data-Center-Networks.html
"this kind of speed allows 100,000 servers to read all of the scanned data in the Library of Congress in less than a tenth of a second."
DuckDuckGo uses Amazon's servers in addition to their own:
http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/28/duckduckgo-architecture-1-million-deep-searches-a-day-and-gr.html
The difficult parts are the connection between what the search engine user tells it they want and what the search engine thinks they actually want and managing the scale of the data index and search volume.
They'd need to have an efficient mapping system. Google uses PageRank and other algorithms to determine site popularity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
For every page indexed, the indexer notes links on the page and increments the popularity of that link in the index. The more inbound links a page has, the more popular it is and that gives it a high reputation. There are other factors like whether the page content matches the title, whether it's selling products or it's just information.
You can see an example what a search engine sees using the terminal on the Mac. The following will download Wikipedia's homepage to the desktop as text:
curl "https://www.wikipedia.org" -o ~/Desktop/wikipedia.txt
From that, the indexer would parse all the text and get the links, then visit the links and so on until all the pages online are done.
Once the indexing is complete, they'd have a ranking of most popular sites and associations with each page's terms.
When a user submits a search, the engine determines the meaning in their search like how Siri works. Those terms are used to look up the index and the most popular sites that fit the search get delivered.
This is where search engines fail badly in certain contexts because something being popular doesn't mean it's right. When you do searches for technical questions, the results are sometimes not the answer but popular sites showing the same unanswered question.
There needs to be intelligent analysis of the content to determine the nature of it, whether it's an opinion, a question, an answer, a historical fact, a peer-reviewed scientific paper and so on. This works better knowing the people who wrote the content too, which is a privacy issue.
Apple has been running Siri for a while and although they feed the data into 3rd party search engines, they wouldn't be starting from nothing. To match or exceed Google they can build up an index and run queries from Siri through both their own engine and Google and compare the results. If their results are worse then they need to improve their index.
It's obviously not just a matter of having enough resources as Microsoft has the resources and hasn't made a better engine than Google. When asked about Apple's engine switch, Microsoft said:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/apple-switches-from-bing-to-google-for-siri-web-search-results-on-ios-and-spotlight-on-mac/
"We value our relationship with Apple and look forward to continuing to partner with them in many ways, including on Bing Image Search in Siri, to provide the best experience possible for our customers. Bing has grown every year since its launch, now powering over a third of all the PC search volume in the U.S., and continues to grow worldwide. It also powers the search experiences of many other partners, including Yahoo (Verizon), AOL and Amazon, as well as the multi-lingual abilities of Twitter. As we move forward, given our work to advance the field of AI, we’re confident that Bing will be at the forefront of providing a more intelligent search experience for our customers and partners."
Microsoft has managed to gain a decent marketshare and they see AI making their search better than competitors in future. The more that the indexer can understand the content, the better the results are. This is where engines like Yandex (Russia) and Baidu (China) sometimes work better as they have a better understanding of their own language and culture (although Google gets blocked to varying degrees so that doesn't help):
https://www.semrush.com/blog/5-advantages-yandex-google-russia/
Having a high volume of users helps search engines so unpopular ones are already at a disadvantage because they can't see what lots of people are looking for. They need to get the users on the platform first and Apple has an advantage with their install base. Getting the data for the index is fairly trivial. Building an index intelligently is hard. I don't think Google has this part done as well as it could be even if it's better than anyone else, their main strength seems to be more from having the marketshare and reacting to user data.
Apple doesn't need to go all in with a search engine, they can build it up. They can be returning some results from their own engine in much the same way DuckDuckGo gets data from multiple sources and how Siri uses partner services like Yelp. It's not something that just gets switched on, it has to evolve.
Whether Apple wants to build and maintain a search engine is another matter. They'd have to take down millions of copyright links all the time and handling exabytes of private data is tough (per-user encryption is easier than pooling data together). Ultimately their motive would be to improve on what's already there but there aren't many people dissatisfied with Google search so it's not even so much that they couldn't improve on it, at least in some areas, I don't think there's much incentive for them.
http://www.searchmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/Searchmetrics-Ranking-Factors-Infographic-EN-Print.pdf
I don't see Apple ever* building its own full search engine a la google, yahoo, bing, ddg. There's too much bad and controversial stuff on there, e.g. terrorism (google, to their shame, is failing at stopping terrorist propaganda), porn, how to commit suicide, racism, etc.
I think Apple can keep providing an improved experience by adding to Siri/spotlight search (as Marvin seems to be saying), and make general web search gradually more and more unnecessary.
*At least not for the next 10-20 years at least, which I'm (wildly) guessing is how long it's going to be before Apple could create a great search engine that blocked out nearly all the 'bad' stuff; while still making the other search engines available.