TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Danny Sullivan:

No, what you do if you’re Apple is what you’re already doing. You keep growing Siri to work with other search partners, to keep Google contained, to win away areas of search where you feel confident Google won’t be missed.

Eventually, maybe you launch an Apple search engine that’s a web-based version of Siri. Perhaps you even call it Siri and make it available through Siri.com. Over time, as Siri continues to grow with answers to popular searches from selected providers, you might eventually change the “backup” search engine that kicks in for when you don’t have a partner. Silently, Google gets replaced by Bing.

Siri should scare the hell out of Google. Bing isn’t much of a threat, because even if Microsoft does outstanding work and makes it a superior search engine to Google, it’s only a matter of degrees—and when you’re competing head-on like Microsoft is with Bing, being slightly better doesn’t mean much to consumers.

But Siri is different. Siri is a classic disruptive technology to the traditional search engine. It’s in no way good enough to compete with Google Search right now, so it’s utilized for a different purpose—interacting with your phone and getting answers to a limited set of questions by talking. But that limited set is expanding, and if Apple continues focusing so much on it, at some point it’s going to be able to answer enough questions that many people may not need to use Google Search very often anymore.

At that point, Siri will be good enough for many people, and it will be a much better solution than Google Search. With Google Search, you type in a query, sort through a list of results, click on one that look right, and look for the answer. With Siri, you just ask it what you want to know, and it tells you. By comparison, Google Search will look ridiculously archaic.

Google should be scared, because if Siri continues to grow, that’s what’s going to happen, and their most significant source of revenue will be severely damaged.