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Apple taking the fight to Google in Search

As we reported back in Feb there is mounting speculation about Apple taking on Google with its own search engine. It increasingly looks like this could be the case with the recent discovery of a web crawling bot originating from Apple’s servers.

apple-vs-google

 

Last week Apple acknowledged the existence of their web crawler aptly named “AppleBot” Apple states it is used by products including Siri and Spotlight (the internal search engine included with the operating system on Macs).

AppleBot is significant. It gives Apple to ability index the web and provide search results without depending on Google or other search engines.  Apple is rapidly expanding its search group & it looks like Apple plans to continue expanding Spotlight’s web search capabilities.  Eventually Apple could be in a position to make Spotlight the default search engine option for both iOS and OS X users (currently Google is the default).

Why should you care?

If Apple does eventually displace Google as the default web search engine on its hardware then this could seriously hurt Google’s advertising revenues, given the vast number of iPhone users globally and rapid growth in mobile search. Should this happen then the resultant competition will likely give you more choice as both a consumer and advertiser.


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About the Author Jeremy Templer & Mark Sceats

Jeremy and Mark are two of the partners behind SureFire Search. Despite their deceptively youthful appearances, both have worked in search marketing for many years. To put that in context, Google didn't even exist when Jeremy started.