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According to most experts in the SEO industry, technology giant Apple Inc, maybe developing its own search platform and to make it as a worthy rival to Google’s own search engine. They made this assumption based on job posting seen on the Apple’s official website that is entitled as “Engineering Project Manager – Apple Search”. The job description for this post says that “a technically driven and creative project manager to manage backend operations for a search platform supporting hundreds of millions of users”. According to the job description mentioned in the ad, the project in question will play a significant role in revolutionizing how people use their desktops and mobile devices.
Not Everybody Agree On it
Many in the industry are asking the question whether Apple is preparing to enter into the highly competitive online search market. Some experts say that in the last two years, the technology was busy in recruiting mode for filling online search positions at their main campus. Also, a Belgian developer has reported that he found a web-crawling searchbot originating from Apple’s servers.
But there are others who believe that Apple is just expanding its technology ecosystem and getting further into people’s household, and search platform does not fit into that ecosystem. Some have pointed out that the company’s search platform may simply be a further improvement for its Spotlight feature, which allows Apple’s OS X Yosemite to search things such as emails, documents, apps and songs on Macs, news, Wikipedia pages, nearby locations, and other items in the iTunes store. According to Benjamin Spiegel who is the director of strategy at GroupM believes that content aggregation, display and indexing do not fit into Apple’s arena. Spiegel says that Apple Search will be used for linking different content libraries together and it can be regarded as an improvement to their cloud computing platform.
The year 2015 mark the end of Google’s 5-year tenure as the default search engine on Apple’s Safari web browser which according to web traffic analysis tool StatCounter currently accounts for a total of 10.28 percent of US internet browser share. According to many recent news reports, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo search engines engaged in talks with about placing their search platform on Safari as their Google contract is coming to an end. But Spiegel expects that the current Apple-Google partnership will continue as the internet search giant has the best user experience, even if it being an Apple competitor.
Apple Supports Search Startup DuckDuck Go
It was in last June that Apple made the announcement of supporting the startup search engine DuckDuckGo in the OS X Yosemite. The startup search platform has joined the league of Yahoo and Bing as Safari web browser’s other pre-set search alternatives, if desktop or mobile users decide to make the transition from the default search, Google. It is well known that Microsoft’s Bing remains as the default search engine of Apple’s Siri. DuckDuck Go has posted a blog after the announcement about their excitement of Apple adding their search platform on Safari so that it will be easy for people to access their anonymous search option. Also, they claimed that their search platform is privacy-focused and they consider it as a huge milestone as their search engine is included in one of the top four web browsers.
After the Edward Snowden revelations, the startup search engine has gained some traction, particularly in the US, where users are concerned about how their search information is being used by Google and other major search engines, and who might be aware of that search history. In 2013, DuckDuck Go celebrated one billion searches and the Apple announcement follows on the startup’s new search design, which was rolled out in May 2014 with an emphasis on providing searchers with “smarter answers”.
From all this we can make a conclusion that Apple is definitely focusing on search platform and in reality, no one knows exactly what Apple Search is. Some industry experts say that it could be the redefined Spotlight device search, or a better solution to search for applications or music on iTunes Store.
