Apple has no interest in search. Honestly, the algorithms for searching and categorizing web pages are pretty trivial stuff as far as cutting edge AI, NLP and link analysis goes. Some of the small-company tech is pretty interesting in the evolutionary sense, but little in the field has been truly revolutionary in the past 5-10 years. Google has no great corner on the market in terms of search technology, and if Apple wanted to buy the bandwidth, pinch green pennies, and try to compete with Google it wouldn't be hard. But they won't. Here's what's really going on for those who don't see the big picture...
Google is first and foremost an advertising company and have been since they were first publicly listed. That's where their bread is buttered. Everything else they do is to drive impressions and click-throughs. Innovations in creatives and penetration in new markets drive higher ad rates, but it really is all about numbers of eyeballs on advertising. New "beta" products drive consumers to commoditized services that add just enough value to keep the masses driving the revenue stream quarter by quarter. As eyeballs have become more mobile, so have their offerings. This is the area that Apple has been slightly encroaching on, because Apple has for the past 30 years derived ALL of their serious revenue off hardware margins, and from mobile devices for the last 10.
The change to the big tech companies --IBM, Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, et. al. -- is the sea change in technology over the past few years as the focus has already shifted from hardware margins and software licenses as a saturated revenue stream to other areas. Both are stalling sources of revenue, and companies are adjust to a world where shrinkwrapped software and commoditized hardware aren't enough. MS has rightly shifted it's offerings to enterprise technology offerings, and does just enough consumer stuff to keep others from encroaching on Exchange/Office/SharePoint. Oracle has locked down back office and enterprise packaging (HR, CRM, Financials, everything backend, especially db's and high-end javaEE) and does consulting. IBM (who ditched PC's, disks, etc.) still does high-end servers and specialty chips, but competes with all of the above technologies, business analytics, enterprise SOA consulting, global instrumentation and outsourcing, and software as service.
So finally on to Apple. For 30 years they have been a manufacturing-centric company. Profits were derived from hardware margins in both computers and consumer electronics. Software and services were value-add to drive hardware sales (music sales, DotMac, now apps). When computers became commoditized, they switched to iPods, when iPods became ubiquitous, they switched to phones, now tablets. Apple never has been bleeding edge, but they have excelled at pushing highend less-tech-elite toward the future high-margin gadgets. They have no chance of ever being successful in enterprise computing (nor desire), and need another revenue stream beyond hardware to continue growing. If you aren't growing, you are dying. SO that puts them up against google in the advertising/mobile/home-consumer space. The difference is that they are much better at delivering a whole ecosystem to people who are attractive to advertisers (young trendy, disposable consumer cash). To move into advertising as their next revenue stream is a no-brainer. But at the same time, don't expect them to compete with google on pure numbers. Expect them to expand their consumer base a little bit, but to continue to offer the total package. Any moves they make will be focused on protecting their existing hardware margins, and deriving new sources of revenue off their existing mobile/home-consumer customers. Acquisitions just help them protect their turf from the others.
