Apple government Eddie Cue stated that Apple is “actively taking a look at” shifting the main target of cell Safari’s search expertise to AI search engines like google and yahoo, probably difficult Google’s longstanding search dominance and the 2 firms’ profitable default search engine deal. The statements had been made whereas Cue testified for the US Division of Justice within the Alphabet/Google antitrust trial, as first reported in Bloomberg.
Cue famous that searches in Safari fell for the primary time ever final 12 months and attributed the shift to customers more and more utilizing giant language model-based options to carry out their searches.
“Previous to AI, my feeling round this was, not one of the others had been legitimate selections,” Cue stated of the deal Apple had with Google, which is a key element within the DOJ’s case in opposition to Alphabet. He added: “I believe at this time there may be a lot better potential as a result of there are new entrants attacking the issue otherwise.”
Right here he was alluding to firms like Perplexity, which search to supply a substitute for semantic search engines like google and yahoo with a chat-like strategy—in addition to others like OpenAI. Cue stated Apple has had talks with Perplexity already.
Talking of AI-based search engines like google and yahoo normally, he stated “we are going to add them to the record”—referring to the default search engine selector in Safari settings. That stated, “they in all probability gained’t be the default” as a result of they nonetheless want to enhance, notably on the subject of indexing.
