Mac OS Irks Search Engines

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September 02, 1998 (5:05 PM EDT)

By John Borland,

A new feature in Apple's operating system has Web search companies worried, and has sparked a last-minute round of negotiations between the online firms and the computer manufacturer.

The Macintosh's next operating-system upgrade is due in October, with several new features to tie it closer to the Internet. One of these is a desktop application, dubbed Sherlock, that acts as a Web search tool, piggybacking on the databases of major Web search companies to retrieve results.

"This is an example of how you will see Apple integrating the Internet into the operating system more and more over time."
-- Steve Jobs
Apple

The feature was demonstrated by Interim CEO Steve Jobs on Tuesday at the Seybold electronic-publishing trade show in San Francisco. A simple, natural language query -- "Why is the sky blue?" -- returned a list of relevancy-ranked Web page links gleaned from major search engines such as AltaVista, Excite, and Infoseek.

"This is an example of how you will see Apple integrating the Internet into the operating system more and more over time," Jobs told an audience of enthusiastic Mac users.

But the search companies, whose business model depends on bringing users to their own sites and keeping them there as long as possible, aren't crazy about the idea of letting Mac users bypass their sites.

"It sounds like they were a little ahead of themselves with the demonstration," said Don Bradley, a spokesman for Compaq's Altavista search site. The company is talking to Apple about possible business deals, Bradley said.

"We are aggressively pursuing negotiations," said Bridgette Lamarche, a spokeswoman for Lycos. "They are keeping us in the loop. But there is no agreement yet."

An Apple spokesman said Wednesday that Jobs' demo had been only a technology demonstration, and did not represent the final product.

"We certainly want to have agreements with the companies," said Russell Brady. "But we have not announced which search companies will be included."

The Sherlock feature is similar to Web services such as Metacrawler, which also queries other search engines to return an aggregate page of search results.

Metacrawler and similar services have won good reviews for providing more complete results than any single engine. But the sites that have spent time and money combing the Web to fill their own databases have long looked at meta-search engines as a kind of Web parasite.

"There's nothing we can do about that. It's the way their product works," said Lamarche, whose employer Lycos is one of the engines used by Metacrawler's search. "We probably would love it if someone else out there were giving them their results."

Sherlock's ability to bypass the search engine's sites is particularly galling for companies aiming at the Web portal market. Nearly all of the major search sites are transforming themselves into portals -- one-stop service centers with directories, search engines, and other utilities and content -- hoping to keep users onsite longer.