Sarah Perez:
The end result was a social search engine built on top of a mapping interface.
Everyone’s watching the visible Apple versus Google battle that is taking place in courts and on smartphone/tablets — but the real war is being waged in search. Apple has been upping its efforts to building a better search solution than Google can offer.
No, I’m not joking.
Look again at how Apple is approaching this. You won’t ever go to Apple.com/search you just will pop open Spotlight, or Siri, on your Apple devices and magically get the result you wanted. All the while bypassing Google completely through the use of clever built-in search tools.
Google wants to give you robust search offerings, complete with highly targeted ads. Apple wants to give you the single right result, without you ever having to visit a web browser.
That should scare the shit out of Google, because Apple is trying to build the more elegant, and built-in, solution.