Is Apple developing its own search?

ACCORDING TO ANALYSIS by the UK’s Financial Times newspaper, Apple is stepping up efforts to develop its own search technologies as US antitrust authorities challenge Google’s position as default search provider on Apple and other devices.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) action alleges that Google has unfairly bought its pre–eminence in search. Analysts estimate Google pays Apple between $8bn and $12bn per year to be configured as the default search on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. As a result, according to the DoJ lawsuit, nearly half of Google search traffic in 2019 came from Apple products — an astonishing figure, given that Google itself controls the rival Android platform. As evidence that Apple is developing its own search, the newspaper cites reports of greatly increased activity by the Applebot web crawler, adding that if you enter a query on the Today screen in iOS 14, you’re served Apple’s own suggestions instead of Google search results. The newspaper notes that Apple hired the former Google head of search, John Giannandrea, in 2018, ostensibly to improve its AI and Siri technologies, but the hire “also brought eight years of experience running the world’s most popular search engine.” Since then, the paper observes, “Apple’s frequent job advertisements for search engineers are not short on ambition, inviting candidates to ‘define and implement the architecture of Apple’s groundbreaking search technology.’” Apple has not commented.