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　　Apple's search engine has twists and turns.

　　Apple search engine core employees leave Google

　　According to recent reports from foreign media, Srinivasan Venkatachary, a core member of Apple's search engine team, has quit Google. four years. With the departure of core members, Apple's search engine project is likely to be "aborted."

　　It is understood that as early as 2018, Apple began planning a search engine project.

　　In April 2018, Apple hired John Giannandrea, the former head of Google search and artificial intelligence, as Apple's senior vice president of machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy. In the same year, Apple also acquired an artificial intelligence start-up company called Laserlike, which was later integrated by Apple into John Giannandrea's team, mainly responsible for developing features such as the search tool Spotlight and Siri suggestions.

　　According to the data, Laserlike was co-founded by three former Google engineers, Anand Shukla, Srinivasan Venkatachary, and Steven Baker. The technology they master can recommend websites based on user preferences and browsing history by searching a large amount of data.

　　While working at Apple, Srinivasan Venkatachary served as a senior director of Apple's search team and expanded the size of the Apple search team, focusing on recruiting some Google search employees. As of departure, Venkatachary managed at least 200 employees.

　　Recently, it was reported that Venkatachary has returned to Google. Venkatachary is now the vice president of engineering for James Manyika, Google's senior vice president of technology and society, according to people familiar with the matter. The other two founders of Laserlike, Anand Shukla and Steven Baker, have been working under Venkatachary before. It is not known whether all three have left Apple.

　　Apple as a search engine: four years and four years

　　Although Apple has always maintained a good cooperative relationship with Google, it is well known that Apple wants to do search.

　　In terms of cooperation, every year, Google pays Apple about 18 billion to 20 billion US dollars to ensure that it is the default search engine on Apple devices. However, according to the latest EU regulations, large technology companies can only use personal data for targeted advertising with the explicit consent of users, allowing users to freely choose browsers, virtual assistants or search engines. This means that the Apple-Google deal will face increasing antitrust scrutiny.

　　In addition to cooperation, Apple has also been thinking about self-developed search engines.

　　After acquiring artificial intelligence startup Laserlike in 2018, Apple has been preparing to launch its own search engine.

　　In 2020, after the launch of iOS 14, Apple officially established a project and began to develop its own search engine. According to reports, the Siri Suggestions service was built on the basis of Apple's Spotlight search service at the time, and search requests were not passed to Google. This means that at that time, Apple's self-developed search engine had already taken shape.

　　But in the four years from 2018 to the present, although Apple has invested a lot of manpower and financial resources in the search engine, there has been no key output.

　　With the departure of the core members of the search engine team, it will be even more difficult for Apple to make a search engine that can compete head-on with Google. According to The Information's report, Apple is still "at least four years away" from achieving this goal.

　　People involved with the team estimate that Apple is at least four years away from launching a potential Google Search replacement, and doing so would undoubtedly require a significant increase in the team's budget. However, Apple could also strike a deal with Microsoft's Bing similar to the Apple-Google deal, given Bing's relatively small share of the search market.