Apple may be developing its own search engine.
A series of recent sightings has pointed out evidence that Apple could be expanding Siri search results and Spotlight Searches even farther, with the company potentially working on a universal search engine.
Should this be true, it would allow Apple to bypass the financial arrangement it has for Google to be the default search engine under iOS and iPadOS in favor of its own engine.
The core of this argument surfaced over at Coywolf on Thursday, when author Jon Henshaw noted that it isn’t clear if Siri Suggestions are using Google at all anymore. Instead, Apple is returning search results with Spotlight Search, and is bypassing other search engines.
Interestingly enough, it’s been noted that some traffic destined for Siri suggestions in iOS 14 has been pulling data from Apple’s services. The same search terms pulled nearly all returning data from Google under iOS 13.
It’s also been noted that Apple is investing heavily in search, and a number of job postings have surfaced looking for search engineers. This, in conjunction with an update to the “AppleBot” web crawler page for web developers was made in June. Henshaw’s article noted that the changes included how to verify traffic was actually coming from Applebot, and the company provided details about differences in the crawler between desktop- and mobile-centric searches. The update also made clear that the crawler renders ages similarly to Google, and a section about search rankings was amplified upon. At present, the information Apple has promulgated about the crawler is very similar, if not identical, to how Google scans pages. The article also noted that the AppleBot web crawler has been busy, which suggests a larger indexing effort.
Finally, Henshaw noted that the product may never come to market, or it could be used as an internal piece of software for either Apple or its operating systems:
“At this point, everything is based on observation and conjecture. They may never release a search engine. It’s also possible that iOS, iPadOS, and macOS users will be using it and not even be aware of it,” writes Henshaw. “It could be so tightly integrated into the operating system and native apps that alerts and Spotlight Searches slowly steal away queries that would have otherwise been made on Google.”
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via AppleInsider and Coywolf