The search engine industry isn't looking good.
Just when both Google and Microsoft reported that they are experiencing a decline in search ads revenue, and after regulators are starting scrutinizing the multibillion-dollar payments that Google makes each year to ensure that its search engine is set as a default on Apple's products, Apple is reportedly developing its own search engine as an alternative to Google.
Apple in attempting to develop its search engine, comes after the release of iOS 14.
With the version of the mobile operating system, users can type in a query into the search window, and Apple will show its own search results instead of Google's.
Through the iOS version, Apple can also display auto-complete style suggest, and highlight how its AI is learning from users most common search queries.
The search engine also has a web search capability, marking it an important advance in Apple’s in-house development. While it isn't as powerful or as capable as Google, the search engine from Apple could form the foundation of a fuller attack on Google, that according to several people in the industry.
Read: How Google Dominates The Internet, With The Help Of Apple, Its Most Vicious Adversary
In other words, Apple's search engine can be an alternative to Google Search, should the authorities decide to block the partnership.
According to a report from Financial Times (FT), search marketing experts are also seeing increased 'Applebot' activities.
Applebot is Apple's version of Googlebot, a crawler for the web. Apple uses this crawler to build a dataset of online database.
What's more, Apple is also said to have recruited a number of experts in the field.
For example, Apple has hired Google's head of search, John Giannandrea. The hire was ostensibly to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities and its Siri virtual assistant, but also brought eight years of experience running the world’s most popular search engine.
Apple is also seen frequently posting job advertisements for search engineers.
Google’s advantage comes from scale. Google was born originally and intentionally from the start as a search engines. And with that, it has gathered data, knowledge and experience for decades.
And at this time, the search engine is also getting hundreds of millions of queries every minute from users all over the world.
That's a humongous advantage.
But when it comes to Apple, the company also has its own advantages.
“They [Apple] have a credible team that I think has the experience and the depth, if they wanted to, to build a more general search engine,” said Bill Coughran, Google’s former engineering chief.
“Apple’s position is very unique because it has the iPhone and iOS. It controls the default browser,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, Neeva’s co-founder and Google’s former head of advertising. Expanding by creating its own search engine should feel “natural” for Apple, he said, as it has the ability to gather data and learn from user behavior at large scale.
Others note that Apple is one of the very few tech companies in the world with enough resources to create a search engine to compete with Google.
By partnering with Google, Apple literally has nothing to lose.
The U.S. Department of Justice speculates that Apple makes around $8 billion to $12 billion per year from Google.
That amount of money is around 20% of Apple’s Services income per year, and Apple earned it by only allowing Google Search to be the default search engine for all of its products.
But seeing that the multi-billion dollar partnership can come to an end one day, like during this time when the deal is under threat by antitrust regulators, arguing that it may be anticompetitive, Apple needs to step up its game, and initiate a backup plan.
The FT report however, only cites circumstantial evidence and industry commentary, and not information from inside sources, and not much of it is new at the time FT reported it.