With the United States Justice Department suing Google for allegedly violating antitrust laws, Apple may be considering putting an end to its partnership with Google as its top priority search engine.
So, who would be taking the place of the search engine giant? Probably not Bing, given the long history of the always ongoing Mac versus Microsoft PC debate. DuckDuckGo’s privacy policies probably make an alliance between it and Apple unlikely as well.
It seems that Apple won’t be reaching out to other search engines to partner with. In fact, it appears that Apple is developing its own search engine now that Google could be cut down to size.
While Apple has yet to confirm this for certain, there have been a few recent developments that have us feeling pretty sure about an Apple search engine:
Applebot Shows Some Movement
Applebot, Apple’s web crawler, has been more active than usual lately. Web crawler bots like this one are used to “crawl” over webpages and gather information and data from these webpages.
More activity means that Applebot’s been crawling webpages for more and more data, presumably to create a database for a future search engine.
iOS 14 Update Drops a Hint
The recent iOS 14 update on iPhone has shown a few hints that Apple might not be relying on Google so much. When an iPhone user searches for something on their phone, Google is the default search engine that displays results. But the iOS update has started to push Google search results out of the search screen and is starting to show results that Apple generates instead.
Apple Hired Google’s Head of Search
Roughly two and a half years ago, Apple poached Google’s head of search, John Giannandrea. Although Giannandrea was brought on to help develop and improve artificial intelligence for Apple, he also came with almost a decade of experience in the realm of creating and improving search engines. Basically, he’s the perfect hire for any company hoping to build a search engine, and he is still working for Apple.
What Does This Mean for SEO and PPC?
Given that the lawsuit against Google hasn’t resulted in anything and that Apple is still utilizing Google, it doesn’t mean a whole lot yet. But that also doesn’t mean that we should start preparing and researching best optimization practices for this Apple search engine.
OppGen is a Google Premier Partner, meaning we’re one of the best digital marketing agencies when it comes to Google Search Ads and have undergone rigorous training for Google’s services. Not only that, but we are also a Bing Search Partner. Even though Bing doesn’t gain as much traction as Google, there are still audiences that are worth targeting that even Google can’t reach.
That said, we have experience in several different search engine platforms and will be eager to learn the best search optimization practices for Apple’s future search engine, when they decide to go public with it. We’ll be keeping a close eye for Apple search engine-related updates and will be sure to keep our clients in the loop, too.
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