Even Though There Is Speculation, Apple's Search Engine May Not Happen

JAKARTA - The court recently ruled that Google is no longer allowed to pay Apple more than US$20 billion (Rp311.7 trillion) per year to become the default search engine on Apple devices. This decision sparked questions about the next step for Apple. One of the options that emerged was creating its own search engine, dubbed the "Apple Search."

Apple has been doing web indexing using Applebots for about a decade, initially for Siri and then for training Apple Intelligence. With its data and resources, many argue that Apple has the potential to build better search engines than Google.

However, this is not as easy as imagined. As Benedict Evans said, even though Apple has a web index, they don't have data generated from users doing web searches, something Google has and is key to their success. Google continues to grow by obtaining data from user activity, which is then used to improve the quality of search results and displayed ads.

Although Apple can replace revenue from Google with revenue from "Apple Search," the $20 billion value is insignificant compared to Apple's total revenue from the service which reached $85 billion last year. Loss of revenue from Google would be a minor setback, but would not change Apple's service growth rate.

Building your own search engine will also be a very risky step for Apple. Google's data-dependent business model for advertising is in sharp contrast to Apple's privacy-first image. If Apple follows Google's footsteps, it could damage its brand.

In addition, investing billions of dollars to create new search engines seems unreasonable amid the emergence of new technologies such as chatbots that might replace conventional search engines in the future.

With all these risks and uncertainties, many are skeptical that Apple will actually take steps to create its own search engine.