Apple government Eddie Cue stated that Apple is “actively taking a look at” shifting the main target of cell Safari’s search expertise to AI search engines like google and yahoo, doubtlessly difficult Google’s longstanding search dominance and the 2 firms’ profitable default search engine deal. The statements have been made whereas Cue testified for the US Division of Justice within the Alphabet/Google antitrust trial, as first reported in Bloomberg.

Cue famous that searches in Safari fell for the primary time ever final yr, and attributed the shift to customers more and more utilizing giant language model-based options to carry out their searches.

“Previous to AI, my feeling round this was, not one of the others have been legitimate selections,” Cue stated of the deal Apple had with Google, which is a key part within the DOJ’s case in opposition to Alphabet. He added: “I believe right this moment there may be a lot higher potential as a result of there are new entrants attacking the issue differently.”

Right here he was alluding to firms like Perplexity, which search to supply an alternative choice to semantic search engines like google and yahoo with a chat-like strategy—in addition to others like OpenAI. Cue stated Apple has had talks with Perplexity already.

Talking of AI-based search engines like google and yahoo basically, he stated “we’ll add them to the record”—referring to the default search engine selector in Safari settings. That stated, “they most likely received’t be the default” as a result of they nonetheless want to enhance, significantly on the subject of indexing.