A few months back details were leaked about a new search engine platform that Apple might be working on. The details that came in suggested that Apple had been working on a search engine platform to rival the Google search engine which has been the number search engine for years now. Now it seems that the antitrust action against Google might fasten up Apple’s plan to launch its search engine. Currently, the company uses SIRI, which is heavily dependent on Google and Yelp’s search to provide the results.
However, with the introduction of iOS 14, Siri is “suggesting” websites directly in federated search results initiated from the Apple search bar. These can be accessed by swiping right from the home screen to start a search and get results from SIRI suggested websites. More details about the same suggest that Apple is currently very active in the development of search engines. The company hired Google SVP of Engineering John Giannandrea to run the company’s machine learning and AI group in 2018, after which he was also given the charge of SIRI. The company has also posted a lot of job postings for search engineers and has increased crawling frequency by Applebot.
It is nowhere close to what Google has, but Apple is slowly increasing its part in the game. One of the issues in the antitrust case was, “In exchange for this privileged access to Apple’s massive consumer base, Google pays Apple billions of dollars in advertising revenue each year, with public estimates ranging around $8–12 billion. The revenues Google shares with Apple make up approximately 15–20 percent of Apple’s worldwide net income.” If the antitrust case disrupts the relations of Apple with Google, then it could be easily seen bringing their own search engine to Apple devices.