Is there any evidence for the existence of a Found search engine? Unless it also revolutionized the need for spidering, it has to be leaving tracks out there.
How is this possible, without Apple bot showing up in my access logs? Would they disguise it as a WebKit client? But then, they should also respect the robots.txt, and I've never seen anything but known crawlers in there.
If this were true, why would Apple have been developing it in secret for so long?
1) If the point was to wait until it was perfect, why did Apple release Siri first? Siri would no doubt tie into Found, so the lack of Apple's perfect search product makes Siri imperfect by extension.
2) Google's advantage is that it has a ton of users, and it bases its algorithms on data about those users. You can't just build a perfect search engine in isolation; you have to tune it to real-world use.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seldon_Crisis