With a series of antitrust activities between the Justice Department and Capitol Hill, an Apple search crawler may be hitting the markets soon, signaling a competitor to Google while making Siri a one-stop-shop.
Apple search crawler activity detected showing signs of the iPhone maker’s interest in search technologies
A significant amount of spidering activity from Apple’s tools to a subtle change to the latest version of the iOS 14 operating system are signs showing the iPhone maker’s interest in search technologies. This action is quite an irony considering a push for anti-competitive practices is creating greater competition among the largest companies dominating the technology industry.
Apple is now displaying its search results and also linking directly to websites when users place their queries on its home screen in iOS 14. This feature has been known to people for quite some time, as they have seen it in the beta version of iOS. It seems to be a significant change in Apple’s in-house search development and could also be a basis for a broader search volume.
John Giannandrea, former head of search of Google who joined Apple, potentially lending his expertise
Apple certainly has expertise in in-house search development. It is less than three years ago that John Giannandrea, Google’s head of search, joined the company to strengthen Apple’s foundations in artificial intelligence and voice search through Siri. But, it could be possible that Giannandrea could be lending his expertise to the team working on a different feature.
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With the development of a search tool, Apple could potentially capture the search market which, is currently dominated by Google. Microsoft’s Bing is the other search service in the market. The increase in search crawler activity could also be explained by Siri getting more search queries and becoming a communicator between Apple and search engines like Google and Bing.
Google says, if given a choice, people will always choose them for a search engine
If Siri becomes a one-stop-shop, it could assist Apple in a situation where they would be forced to enable a search provider choice by regulation in the iOS onboarding flow. It will not affect Google since it pays Apple billions for iOS users who are worth more than any other mobile web users. Also, the search giant says that if given a choice, people will always choose Google.
