Several 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 to rival the latter.
According to a report from Information, the employees who left were the 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 habits. of navigation. Apple reportedly acquired the company to improve search functionality in Siri and Spotlight.
It has been rumored for years that Apple is working on building its own search engine, although the company itself has never confirmed it. Google currently pays Apple billions of dollars each 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 having to swipe down from the home screen to access Spotlight, users can simply tap the button. Look at the bottom of the screen. starting screen. The small UI change appears to be an effort by Apple to get users to use Spotlight instead of launching Chrome or another browser on their phones.