Categories: Web

Eric Schmidt: Apple’s Siri is a threat to Google’s market share

Apple’s Siri is a direct threat to Google’s search market share, according to Google’s Eric Schmidt.

Apple's Siri - © Apple

Google’s Chairman made the comment in a letter to the U.S. Senate’s Antitrust Subcommittee on Friday.   The committee is investigating if Google’s lead in the search market, which ComScore places as as high as 65%, is “threatening competition.”

In the letter Schmidt said, “Apple has launched an entirely new approach to search technology with Siri, its voice-activated search and task-completion service built into the iPhone 4S.”

In the same letter Schmidt says that Google faces increasing search competition from other sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Bing, and Yelp.  His comments echo ones he made in September to the same committee.  In his September letter Schmidt set out Google’s view of the search market

“Google faces competition from numerous sources including other general search engines (such as Microsoft‟s Bing, Yahoo!, and Blekko); specialized search sites, including travel sites (like Expedia and Travelocity), restaurant reviews (like Yelp), and shopping sites (like Amazon and eBay); social media sites (like Facebook); and mobile applications beyond count, just to name a few.”

He also pointed to Microsoft’s instillation of Bing as the default search for many of Microsoft’s products, and Microsoft’s provision of Bing search results to Yahoo!, and Facebook, as well as English language search results for the Chinese search engine Baidu.

While Steve Jobs refused to describe Siri, which Apple purchased for a sum reported to be between $50 million and $100 million, as a search engine the application uses a number of search engines to return results to the user.

This isn’t the first suggestion that Siri could be a significant source of competition for Google. Writing over a month ago, Giga.com said that Siri “has the potential to divert significant traffic away from Google and other search engines.”

Siri was launched as part of Apple’s iPhone 4S and originated from artificial intelligence research funded by DARPA, the arm of the U.S. Military whose research led to the creation of the Internt.

Ajit Jain

Ajit Jain is marketing and sales head at Octal Info Solution, a leading iPhone app development company and offering platform to hire Android app developers for your own app development project. He is available to connect on Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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  • Google's era under Eric Schmidt had involved into multiple crimes in Stanford which is fascism by nature.

    Google's Eric Schmidt had abused google resources to financially and politicially supported a criminal suspect named Gabriele Scheler, along with a Stanford Computer Science faculty Sebastian Thrun, against ruling from Stanford and police authorities. During their fight with Stanford, Eric Schmidt's side had murdered an innocent Stanford student May Zhou in 2007 (http://www.mayzhou.com) to threaten me and to terrorize Stanford. When they found I would not compromise bit but actively tried to clarify the case, Eric Schmidt's side did plot a murder on me as well. The only reason they didn't make it a reality is becaue they were closely watched by police and they are afraid of leaving evidence (not becasuse they have any mercy on me as a human being, fascism by nature.) Eric Schmidt lost his CEO position because of his involvment into these crimes. Proof of real names, dates, photos along with a police case number are listed in my blog link [ http://tysurl.com/BsEnQ4 ].

    Eric Schmidt and Sebastian Thrun had not paid for their crimes and they would have to, despite all the hypes about them.

  • Siri will kill Google Local Search, and will have intregation with Bing Maps. It would be the revenge that Steve Jobs wanted, as people don't search for content articles so much on smartphones.

    • @desbest Siri, and other niche search engines will definitely eat away at Google's dominance (but they won't kill it) but I'd say Apple won't go with Bing. They have bought out a mapping company that specializes in hi-rez 3D maps - they're worth looking at http://j.mp/rDHqJW

      Removing Google Maps from iOS will be Apple's next step.

  • Google's era under Eric Schmidt had involved into multiple crimes in Stanford which is fascism by nature.

    Google's Eric Schmidt had abused google resources to financially and politicially supported a criminal suspect named Gabriele Scheler, along with a Stanford Computer Science faculty Sebastian Thrun, against ruling from Stanford and police authorities. During their fight with Stanford, Eric Schmidt's side had murdered an innocent Stanford student May Zhou in 2007 (http://www.mayzhou.com) to threaten me and to terrorize Stanford. When they found I would not compromise bit but actively tried to clarify the case, Eric Schmidt's side did plot a murder on me as well. The only reason they didn't make it a reality is becaue they were closely watched by police and they are afraid of leaving evidence (not becasuse they have any mercy on me as a human being, fascism by nature.) Eric Schmidt lost his CEO position because of his involvment into these crimes. Proof of real names, dates, photos along with a police case number are listed in my blog link [ http://tysurl.com/BsEnQ4 ].

    Eric Schmidt and Sebastian Thrun had not paid for their crimes and they would have to, despite all the hypes about them.

  • Siri will kill Google Local Search, and will have intregation with Bing Maps. It would be the revenge that Steve Jobs wanted, as people don't search for content articles so much on smartphones.

    • @desbest Siri, and other niche search engines will definitely eat away at Google's dominance (but they won't kill it) but I'd say Apple won't go with Bing. They have bought out a mapping company that specializes in hi-rez 3D maps - they're worth looking at http://j.mp/rDHqJW

      Removing Google Maps from iOS will be Apple's next step.

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