Applebot, Apple's search engine to compete with Google

According to a report in the Financial Times, Apple may be working on a new search engine. Experts claim that Apple has accelerated the development of its Applebot. This is an Apple's indexer that would be enhancing search engines to avoid using Google as the default search engine. However, some think that they might be making improvements to Siri and Spotlight, rather than working on a search engine.

With the new iOS14 update, Apple's search engine has proven capable of filtering its search results to answer questions posed by users through its home screen. This could mean that Applebot has recently increased its activity and has perfected functionalities such as traffic verification or page rendering similarly to how Google does it. Another reason that could confirm this theory is the hiring of John Giannandrea in 2018, the former head of search at Google, who might be sharing knowledge about the operation of the famous search engine.

On the other hand, specialized sites claim that Apple is receiving a sum of between 8 and 12 billion dollars from Google for making its search engine the default. Such a fact has led the Department of Justice to sue Google for violating antitrust laws. Given this problem and, according to Forbes magazine, Apple might consider stopping receiving payments from Google since it has a market capitalization of 2 trillion dollars and approximately 200 billion in cash.

Therefore, Apple could afford to give up Google's search engine and could have its own search tool, besides saving itself legal troubles. Such potential changes could present a new paradigm in the world of marketing and SEO, which currently happens almost solely around Google's search engine. By now, it is impossible to anticipate the changes since the company has not confirmed or detailed anything about it.