Some developers are reporting that the number of activities of Apple's web crawler Applebot has increased. According to their website statistics, the number of visits has increased. Is Apple working on its own search engine?
Based on this finding, speculation has now been sparked that Apple could be working on its own search engine. So will Google and Co. get competition? Some observers, however, do not believe in the search engine theory. Much more likely is the improvement of search results in Siri and Spotlight. Jon Henshaw, founder of the company Coywolf, which offers insights into digital marketing, has now sparked speculation with a blog postIn it, Henshaw explained that the Applebot crawls his website regularly - daily - but that he only noticed this recently.
Applebot was last updated in July
On Twitter, Stack Overflow engineer Nick Craver and digital marketing consultant Michael James Field also noticed such activity, saying that the number of Applebot visits to websites it monitors has increased significantly. Like other web crawlers, Applebot crawls the web to determine how to rank search results based on a variety of factors, including user engagement, the relevance and match of search terms to a page's topics and content, the number of links a page has received from other websites, and design features. Henshaw also noted that Apple updated its Applebot support document in July. is called it:
But “just” an improvement of Siri and Spotlight?
- Added how to inspect Applebot traffic.
- Advanced details about the Applebot user agent including the differences between its desktop and mobile versions
- Advanced robots.txt rules
- A section has been added stating that they not only crawl HTML but also render pages similar to Google
- Added a section on search rankings and the factors that influence web search results ranking
Given that Apple itself is a privacy-focused company without an advertising or data-driven business model like Google or Facebook, it remains uncertain whether the company will ever want to go down the path to a full-fledged search engine. DuckDuckGo has at least shown that this is possible with data protection in mind. The idea that Apple could introduce its own search engine is not new, however. The first speculations arose in 2015, when the company introduced Applebot. Corresponding job offers have fueled the rumor several times. So whether this is an improvement to the search results of Siri and Spotlight cannot currently be confirmed with certainty. The theory of an own search engine cannot be verified either. So the whole thing remains exciting. (Photo by Prathan / Bigstockphoto)
