Right, so when I type something into the Safari search bar on iOS, it gives me Apple-sourced suggestions from the web, even though I have "Search Engine Suggestions" turned off (because I don't want my URL typing history leaking to a search engine).

That qualifies as "already in the search business" IMO.

> That qualifies as "already in the search business" IMO.

Well they are definitely in the search business anyway, as >20% of Apple's annual revenue is from search.

It's just that all the revenue apple makes from search comes directly from Google in the form of a $20bn payment, and Google powers almost all their actual web searches (i.e. not instant suggestions), so I think it's hardly an independent 'search business' and more of a 'search partnership with Google'.

I'm honestly not seeing the difference you're drawing between "web searches" and "instant suggestions".

If I type some characters into a search box, and the phone displays the title and domain of a website that it thinks I might be looking for, that counts as a "web search" to me. iOS Safari does that using an Apple-powered web index.

But whatever.

The difference is the index size and generality for me - for instance I can search "lkasdjfai" in Google and it will show me the one time that someone once said that on Flickr.

Siri only needs to return a result when it thinks its got a worthwhile result to show, it won't search all documents to find the phrase I want (and returns nothing if I search lkasdjfai, and falls back to Google results). It never even says "siri found no matches for lkasdjfai".

I can't use Siri to search for my cousin for instance (I just tried) but with Google he comes up straight away.

So for me, a web search is when you are searching any arbitrary phrase and bringing back results for any query, where instant suggestions is an optional response when you think you have a good result.

You should search "lkasdjfai" now :)