I went into the article expecting it to be absurb and ridiculous and instead I came out agreeing with a lot of what they had to say.
Apple provides results that reflect FUNCTIONAL (application) solutions, Google provides results that reflect INFORMATIVE (content) solutions.
An app that tells you the weather in your area is a functional (application) solution? One that gets you the lyrics to a song is a functional (application) solution?
I think not.
What Apple provides is strictly for it’s own restrictive, filtered and limited system that’s explicitly for the needs of those wanting functional advantages (to enhance their devices ability to-do things), it doesn’t in any way push against Google’s business model of helping individuals find content and information (that is not bound by pre-approval).
The article quotes many apps that push against Google’s business model.
The ability to syndicate explicit content to an explicit audience which is pre-approved has no level of comparison against free flowing results which are determined not based on what some one person things you should see, but has been decentralised to be free of restriction or penalty against origin. 
The article isn’t stating that Apple is going to destroy Google (they may infer it a bit) but simply that they are going to take a very large piece of the search pie (and the part that makes money) from Google.
If an app can identify songs and lyrics better than Google can, then why would people go to Google to search for them. And if Lyrics is truly the number 1 searched item on Google for the last 6 years then that becomes a hit to Google’s search numbers.
If an app can give me restaurant reviews in my neighbourhood, why do I go to Google to search for them?
If an app can tell me the weather forecast, why would I go to Google?
Etc… etc… etc…
Google will always be better at general information queries and long-tail stuff but Apple could make a significant debt in the bread and butter general queries (insurance comparison app anyone?) that make Google a large share of it’s money.
That brings up a funny story about Google and Facebook.
A few months ago Facebook changed something about their login functionality and a blogger wrote a post about it. That post became the #1 result when people searched for Facebook login on Google which resulted in hundreds of angry comments on his blog from people who couldn’t understand why they couldn’t log into Facebook from his page.
His page did not look like Facebook at all, he even put a big red disclaimer on the post that they were not on Facebook and still he received angry comment after angry comment telling him to fix the login and to change it back to the old way or people were going to delete their accounts (you can’t even figure out how to login and you expect to be able to figure out how to delete an account? ha!), etc…
I completely disagree Alex. Apples apps (and others) provide common daily services that no longer need to be searched for anymore. As an example, the simple fact (as the article states) that most people type in “facebook” in Google’s search box rather than the URL box proves this. There is now a dedicated facebook app that everyone with an iPhone uses instead of daily searching for it. There are thousands of other examples such as this.
Although, Google isn’t just a seach engine anymore - it’s so much more. Theve got their hands in just about everything thats “web”. So I think they’ll be just fine.
What an absurd article… Google’s and Apple’s search aims have nothing in common whatsoever.
Apple provides results that reflect FUNCTIONAL (application) solutions, Google provides results that reflect INFORMATIVE (content) solutions.
What Apple provides is strictly for it’s own restrictive, filtered and limited system that’s explicitly for the needs of those wanting functional advantages (to enhance their devices ability to-do things), it doesn’t in any way push against Google’s business model of helping individuals find content and information (that is not bound by pre-approval). The ability to syndicate explicit content to an explicit audience which is pre-approved has no level of comparison against free flowing results which are determined not based on what some one person things you should see, but has been decentralised to be free of restriction or penalty against origin.
These two cannot be compared. They are two distinct businesses.
That last story is absolutely hilarious…if I was working at Google, I would do that more often 