At the heart of Apple’s Maps, iTunes Store, App Store products is search. Customers search for songs, movies, apps, and locations constantly, and ensuring that search is reliable is critical to the experience of using those Apple products. Apple’s Maps app is notorious for unreliable search results, and Apple users have criticized the App Store for having an unwieldy search process.
Of course, Apple is taking steps to alleviate these problems: Maps will be improved significantly with iOS 8 this fall, and the App Store has been receiving search tweaks in recent weeks. With Dupin’s experience in search technology on a massive scale, it seems likely that Apple’s web-based properties will receive even more enhancements and improvements to search over the next few years.
Of course, it seems plausible that Dupin’s management and engineering experience in search can be translated over to Apple. Perhaps the quote from Dupin on his old A9 profile sums up his potential benefit to Apple best:
Our ranking algorithms automatically learn to combine multiple relevance features. Our catalog’s structured data provides us with many such relevance features and we learn from past search patterns and adapt to what is important to our customers.
We strive for continuous improvement of our ranking algorithms. We continuously evaluate them using human judgments, programmatic analysis, key business metrics and performance metrics.
As for A9, it does not appear that a successor to Dupin has been appointed. Dupin joins VP of Online Stores Bob Kupbens on the 2014 list of executives who have jumped to Apple from other major companies.
