iSearch?

You mean something like bing which after years of being place has not made a single profit? I don't see apple spending hundreds of millions of dollars with little hope of ever seeing that money again as a wise business move.

How does a search engine line up with apple's focus on consumers and electronics.

From what I've read they went into the mapping business because google refused to provide the same level of features in iOS as it had in Android. Also we know how well Apple Maps was when it was first released. I'm sure its better but to be honest it has such a negative reputation now, I doubt its used as much as Apple wishes it would be. My point is that they produced something that is outside of their expertise and look what happened - it was a disaster.

Dream on.

Chicken and egg.
They'd need users to use the Apple Search, but users would be unlikely to want to use Apple Search until they knew it was better/as good as Google (unlikely).

Apple's current focus is on integration: getting other database providers, Yell, Yelp, et al, into the Siri search assistant platform, then displaying the results integrated into Apple Maps, so the need for Googling for such info being suppressed. (Although, presumably somehow better shoehorning of Google Search in there as well somehow in future...??).


More poignantly...
Google is an advertising company first and foremost – most of their revenue comes from ads.
Apple is the opposite, a hardware company.
Although the cross-over is services: Apple could just as likely be described more recently as a product company (with hardware, adding services like iCloud, iTunes, iTunes In The Cloud, iTunes Match, etc.), as can Google, but Apple mainly SELLS the services as ad-free (often, but not always, incorporated into the price of the hardware), whereas Google serve-up ads within their core services offering instead.
So essentially they're doing two differing business models, with some cross-over, but differing in income generation.


You also do realise that the infrastructure Google implements in just their search platform alone is immense. They have data centres all over world, and have to constantly re-gig their search algorithm regularly to provide the best relevant results to users. Highly specialised and highly proprietary work – you don't learn how to do that overnight, it took them YEARS to get to where they are now with search, and any newcomer would have a mountain the size of Everest to climb!

Remember too that Apple know next to nothing about search, and acquiring the expertise is not something a company of any size would want to do, unless they saw clear evidence of something they could add to the marketplace that Google didn't/couldn't (again, HIGHLY unlikely).

Finally, Google are highly unlikely to lock Apple out of their search platform, so why bother investing gazillions in such an unknown-outcome enterprise. Why do you think Google make their own free iOS apps? For good reason: to make money out of those users using their ad-supported platform via these apps. And with several hundred million iOS devices out there, they know this would be shooting themselves in the foot.


Shame really not more competition, as that leads to better products for users, but there it is.