Former CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, has always been in Apple’s guest list as it sends out all its invitations for the major events. Although the chief executive officer of Yelp Inc, the consumer review website, has never been invited at these gatherings, his business has turned out to be a crucial weapon in Apple’s system as the company starts its battle over Google Inc.
With other big consumer websites including OpenTable, a restaurant booking service, Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review website, Yelp Inc will be assisting in Apple’s Siri project in the new iOS6.
The connection between Apple and Yelp demonstrates the power challenge over how users discover the things they are searching for on the web.
Significantly a level above the artificial intelligence, Siri is growing as a crucial application for what people call ‘casual search’, – instantly getting information such as locating a nearby petrol station. This new design is targeted towards the public who use mobile phones as their primary point of access to internet.
This can sidestep Google and other search engines. That serves Apple’s concerns to gain this opportunity to muscle in on Google’s primary business and make associated advertising and marketing profits.
However, the two parties benefit with the deal as Siri is a potential project for Yelp and other major companies as well which have discovered themselves in race with Google.
Larry Cornett, founder of Brilliant Forge and ex- employee as consumer products head at Yahoo, said “Google is an immediate rival to Yelp, and we are positive Yelp knows it.”
Like other sites that fight to stand top in Google for traffic, Yelp, which is dependent on Google, will be delighted to gain direct traffic from Apple’s future version of Siri.
Google continues to reigns superior in web search, used and loved by people for its appropriate search results and companies for its extreme reach.
Fat cat competitors like Microsoft with its Bing search, have raced in vain for years to gain over Google’s popularity among public.
Instead of competing with Google on web search by battling with ever-changing algorithms refined by the large number of searches carried out every day – Apple is using another way of focusing on a subset of the Google search that people are likely to search when they are not in front of their PCs or laptops.
This includes eating places, sports, films, maps and locations – where fast and easy results are preferred, instead of results involving more research that people carry out on Google.
The growing use of smart devices for browsing internet on the go is the primary reason for concentrating on this trend. Former CEO of A9.com and venture capitalist with New Venture Partners, David Tennenhouse said, Marketers as well value these mobile searches as potential that are closely related to location and time
“This is like cream skimming” said David.
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