Several employees who were part of Apple’s search team have reportedly left the company to join Google.
According to a report by The Information, all those employees who left were previously founders of Laserlike, which Apple acquired in 2018.
For all those who don’t know, Laserlike was founded by three former Google Search engineers, Anand Shukla, Srinivasan Venkatachary and Steven Baker in 2015. The company was a service which made website recommendations to users based on their interests and browsing habits.
Apple acquired the company hoping to improve the search functionality of Siri and Spotlight.
It is reportedly mentioned that Srinivasan is now the company’s new Vice President of engineering, he reports to James Manyike, Senior Vice President of technology and society. While Baker and Shukla are both working under Manyike’s team.
It is not yet confirmed if all three employees left at the same time.
Apart from this development, it is rumoured that Apple is working on making its own search engine, although the company never confirmed same.
Speaking of introducing a search engine, it is expected that Apple might introduce its own search engine four years from now, reports an unnamed source from The Information. It is still not clear if the plan for a separate search engine will ever come to life after the company has lost three people from the search team.
Speaking of the Apple search engine, the company with the recent iOS 16 update, the spotlight option now appears on the bottom of the screen.
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