Apple’s own search engine is closer than we think. As we told you recently, Google is not going through its best moment judicially speaking, as it is immersed in litigation with the United States Department of Justice as they are accused of exercising a dominant position in the search engine industry. As a result of this legal battle, it was discovered that Google pays Apple a fortune (8 to 12 billion dollars) for being the default search engine on iOS devices.
There were already clues that Apple might be creating its own search engine. This whole issue makes us think even more about it, since the agreement with Google might be canceled.
Apple has started to display its own search results when we perform queries from the home screen by invoking the Spotlight. That web search capability marks a major advance in Apple’s internal development and could form the basis of a more comprehensive attack on Google, according to several people in the industry.
Another clue is that Apple has its own indexer called Applebot which works for Siri and the searches we do through the Spotlight. Also, Applebot has appeared an incredible number of times on its customers’ websites in recent weeks.
Apple hired John Giannandrea (former Google employee) two years ago, to improve the capabilities of artificial intelligence and Siri. Finally, if we look at the company’s job offers, they are looking for engineers specialized in defining and implementing the architecture of Apple’s search technology.
Apple’s own search engine is closer than we think. Even though there’s a chance of losing a good part of its profits, disassociating itself from Google by creating its own search engine would be fantastic for Apple it seems.
