Apple working on alternative to Google Search

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Interesting article in the Financial Times today: https://www.ft.com/content/fd311801-e863-41fe-82cf-3d98c4c47e26 (sub required, but you can find a summary here )

Seems a lot of insiders are suggesting Apple is working on a genuine Google Search alternative. There are people reporting an extreme surge in visits from Applebot on their websites.

One of the mentioned reasons is the coming antitrust case against Google, which might cause trouble for the yearly payments from Google to Apple for using Google Search as their standard search engine ($10 billion / year). Similar to how Microsoft had to allow users to pick their browser due to lawsuits.

Another reason for developing their own search engine is improving Siri. Apparently in iOS 14 some search queries are already bypassing Google and showing results generated by Apple.

Curious to see if Apple will actually make a full-blown search engine. Competition for Google would probably be good, maybe in 10 years we'll see people optimizing their sites for either Google or Apple (or both). Or they could just become another Bing.
 
Yeah Apple isn't messing around here is their bot: http://www.apple.com/go/applebot

Code:
192.168.255.50 - - [28/Oct/2020:14:48:49 -0400] "GET /serp-view/ HTTP/1.1" 200 6256 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_5) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.1.1 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)"


Apple Search may take the following into account when ranking web search results:

  • Aggregated user engagement with search results
  • Relevancy and matching of search terms to webpage topics and content
  • Number and quality of links from other pages on the web
  • User location based signals (approximate data)
  • Webpage design characteristics
--

I looked into SW's http logs for today and Applebot's been here 128 times TODAY.
 
Can confirm. I know someone currently contracted as a SERP quality evaluator. I welcome having another competitive search engine!
 
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