Re: Flawed logic
An Apple search engine would immediately have a huge audience. 25% mobile market share is a massive audience of well over a billion people - and with higher average incomes than the 75% using Android. Even if no one used it outside of a iPhone or Mac it is guaranteed success. The fact Google is willing to pay $15 billion to be the default search in Safari shows how much they think that audience is worth.
Google's search is crappy and gets worse every year with more spam and useless cruft clogging up the results, and Google's near monopoly on search means they have every incentive to slant the results in a way that's most profitable for them rather than most useful for the person doing the searching. It rarely searches on the terms you give it, you have to force it to use words you want lest it direct you where it is making the most money with pages that don't include the stuff you are explicitly searching for!
Just look at Apple Maps, they were clearly inferior to Google Maps when launched but over time they fixed the issues and almost everyone with an iPhone uses that. The same would be true of Apple Search even if it started with a bit of a rocky rollout. Stuff like ChatGPT is going to disrupt the search market, that's why Google panicked and put out their own dog & pony show to compete with Microsoft's - they fear Bing might become a real competitor to them and take away their lifeblood of advertising revenue. The next few years would be the perfect time for Apple to jump in.
That said I don't think Apple feels they have any reason to so long as they get paid 11 digit sums to make Google (or BingGPT down the road, who knows?) the default search in Safari. If governments step in and force an end to that, Apple is obviously going to do their own search engine. They have been crawling the web and indexing for years (it identifies as Applebot) and the results have long been used in limited ways for stuff like Siri and Spotlight. They probably would only need to point Safari at their search engine (after beefing up its capacity to deal with the vastly increased load) to make this happen, it isn't like they would be starting from scratch.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
