A number of employees who are part of Apple’s search team have reportedly left the company to join Google in a setback to the former’s ambitions to develop a search engine that rivals the latter.
According to a report by The Information, the employees who had left were founders of the company Laserlike, which Apple had acquired in 2018. Founded by three former Google Search engineers, Laserlike was a service that made website recommendations to users based on their interests and browsing habits. Apple reportedly acquired the company to improve the search functionality on Siri and Spotlight.
It has been rumoured for many years that Apple is working on building its own search engine even though the company itself has never confirmed it. Currently, Google pays Apple billions of dollars every year to keep Google as the default search engine on Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices.
🍎New: Apple bought some talented ex-Google Search engineers to build a potential rival search engine to Google. Now Google has lured them back. https://t.co/RYzDCeCgzF @jon_victor_
— Amir Efrati (@amir) November 11, 2022
Apple recently moved the Spotlight search button to the bottom of the screen, starting with iOS 16. This means that instead of needing to swipe down from the home screen to get into Spotlight, users could simply tap on the Search button at the bottom of the home screen. The small user interface change seems to be an effort from Apple to make users use Spotlight instead of launching Chrome or another browser on their phones.
