Apple is pouring resources & money into a new search engine

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Changes in Spotlight Search on iOS and iPadOS 14 beta, a significant update to its Applebot support page, and an increase in crawling from AppleBot signify that Apple may be launching a search engine soon. By Jon Henshaw.

For several years, it’s been reported that Google pays billions of dollars to Apple to remain the default search engine on Safari for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The deal ensures that iPhone, iPad, and Mac users search with Google when they use Safari. That is unless they manually change the default search engine in Safari’s preferences.

The article then describes:

  • Why Apple might be launching a search engine
  • iOS and iPadOS 14 beta bypasses Google Search with Spotlight Search
  • Apple recently updated its Applebot web crawler page
  • Applebot has been busy crawling sites
  • What Apple has to gain from launching a search engine
  • What will this mean for SEO?

If Apple can capture enough market share, it will force SEOs to adapt and optimize for their search engine. In some ways, at least based on their Applebot documentation, tactics will remain the same. But SEOs can also expect to test and discover new opportunities that aren’t possible with Google or other modern search engines. Interesting!

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Tags software miscellaneous software-architecture cio data-science