Apple might be working on launching its own search engine and according to reports there are several clues online that support the possibility including job announcements for search engineers. Apple is looking for to create its Spotlight Search to take on Google Search with iOS 14 beta. Reports have it that Google pays billions of dollars to Apple to remain their default search engine on iOS, macOS and iPadOS. And this deal has allegedly also come under the scrutiny of UK market regulators. And possibly because of that, Apple might be looking to develop its own search engine.
As per Coywolf, the several indicators of Apple working on its own search engine include these job postings doe search engineers. The listings stress on integrating artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) into other services. The new post also adds that with iOS 14 beta and iPadOS 14 beta, Apple’s Spotlight Search bypasses Google Search to show search results. Applebot, which is the tech giant’s won Web crawler has been crawling all sites regularly as well. The Applebot support page was also recently updated.
Going by the Spotlight Search behaviour the job postings, there are speculations that Apple’s search engine might actually be a personalised data hub. Coywolf suggests that it might be similar to Google Assistant on Android devices but devoid of ads and completely private. Apple could put ML and AI to optimal use to return search results based on the user’s contacts, events, emails, files, messages, documents, maps, music, news, notes, photos, reminders, movies and TV shows, third-party apps etc. There are parallel speculations that Apple’s new search engine, if rumours are indeed true, is going to challenge Google’s monopoly on search and impact its ad revenue and data mining.
