New rumors suggest that Apple may be working on its own search engine to compete with Google search. There are indications of several changes to Spotlight Search that are taking place with the arrival of iOS 14 and iPad OS 14, as well as a significant update to Applebot. This means that the company may be launching its own search engine.

Apple could launch its own search engine to compete with Google

For several years, Google has been reported to pay Apple billions of dollars to remain the default search engine in Safari for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The agreement between Apple and Google could come to an end very soon. In July 2020, it was reported that the UK Competition and Markets Authority was targeting the deal. Regulators in Europe can force Apple to remove Google as the default search engine and have users choose which search engine they want to use in Safari.

This regulatory pressure pushes Apple to develop a search engine and thus exclude Google from all its devices. However, the Apple search engine would be very different from the traditional ones like Bing or Google Search. Since it will have a different purpose than just showing ads or data mining.

It would likely be ad-free, completely private, and have significantly deeper integrations with the operating system. For now, we do not know how it will be and much less how it will work. If it will be accessible to everyone or can only be accessed from Apple devices. Thus, many details are yet to be known about it.

Although the subject was quite calm, several developers have detected an unusual activity of Applebot, as it seems to have increased its logs significantly. This fact has been the one that has raised the speculation that Apple is developing its own search engine. It could be an alternative to Google or improvements to Siri and Spotlight search.