Apple is apparently working on its own search engine and ditching Google Search

Each year Google pays Apple somewhere between $8 to $12 billion to keep its search engine as default on Apple devices. It has been a longstanding business relationship that seemed quite solid. However, according to several sources, certain signs are pointing out that Apple might be looking to spin out of that relationship and instead use their own search engine.

The rumor mill first started with Jon Henshaw, founder of Coywolf, claiming that Applebots started regularly crawling his websites.

The increased activity was also noted by Nick Craver, an engineer at Stack Overflow, and Michale James Field, a digital marketing consultant. Both of them tweeted about the massive spike in crawls from Apple’s web crawler – Applebot.

Many people don’t know that Apple has a web crawler called Applebot, and that has been around since 2015

At that time, Apple said that the goal of Applebot is to improve Spotify and Siri search results. Recently, the Applebot seems en route to extending its original purpose.

Another strong hint is job postings on its official website. There has been a significant increase in job openings related to search engines.

Then there is the Justice Department lawsuit in which Google is blamed for using illegal tactics to protect its monopoly. According to a recent report by Financial Times, Apple doesn’t look kindly on that, and because of that, Apple is ramping up its efforts to replace Google search with its own search engine.

The Financial Times report claims that Apple is already showing its search results on devices running iOS 14. Jon Henshaw (Coywolf) even claims that Apple is already bypassing Google to return search queries within Spotify Search.

It’s even more suspicious that the Applebot received a massive upgrade earlier in July. With the new update, the Applebot increasingly resembles a classic web crawler, similar to Google’s web crawlers.

Receiving billions for just allowing Google search to be the default search engine, is a sweet deal for most companies. But Apple seems committed to creating a search engine that will be in line with its longstanding practice regarding privacy and user data, unlike Google and Bing. So instead of a classic search engine that thrives on data mining, they will perhaps create a search engine that will leverage machine learning and AI to provide the best possible search results.

What do you think? Did you know Google was paying Apple for this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Apple is apparently working on a smaller AirPods Pro model and updated AirPods
• Apparently, the iPhone 12 has the ability to reverse wireless charge
• The HomePod mini is the $99 smart speaker you probably didn’t know you needed
• Google Shopping has a slick new price comparison and deal notifications feature

Deep Ballu