We know that Apple is running a web crawler. Although Apple has been working on search-related businesses (e.g. Siri) for some time, it is highly likely that Apple’s web crawling is related to Spotlight and Safari enhancements in both OS X Yosemite and iOS 8.
Apple’s recent job posting on Apple’s web site suggests that the company is continuing to explore “search”:
Apple’s exciting new Spotlight Suggestions service provides fast, relevant search results from the Internet in Spotlight and Safari on iOS and OS X. We are looking for an innovative & detail-oriented Data Scientist who will play a central role in developing upcoming versions of the feature. The Spotlight Suggestions service is built on massive amount of data crawled from the Internet, sourced from feeds and generated from user interactions with search results. As a member of our data science team, you’d be responsible for mining these datasets to help create new features and improve relevance of search results. We are looking for scientists who are passionate about creating data driven systems and have experience in statistical programming, machine learning, and use of modern big data systems like Hadoop.
Spotlight and Safari searches provides web search suggestions from Bing and Google. Apple may ditch Google and Bing and could be developing its own search engine that could also power Siri. Could Apple launch is own search engine in 2015? Also important to add that Apple hired William Stasior, a prominent search expert, in 2012. What do you think?
