Apple to announce a new search engine at WWDC on June 6?

    ByVirginia D. Bannon

    May 31, 2022

    Robert Scoble has published a bunch of articles on what to expect from the Apple’s WWDC (aka World Wide Developer Conference) which takes place on Monday June 6th. Robert said a bunch of things but specific to search, he said “and a new search engine is coming too”.

    Robert posted this on Twitter saying “Oh, and a new search engine is coming too. Will Siri finally get ‘smart?’ Hmmm.” Here is that tweet:

    This was obviously a minor point on Robert’s part, Robert knows a lot more about what to expect when it comes to Apple’s Augmented Reality (AR). Maybe we’ll see Apple Glasses soon?

    We explained how Apple has slowly shown signs of entering web search over the years. In 2014, yes, 8 years ago, we saw signs of an Apple Spider – Applebot. Then, in 2015, observations of AppleBot and Apple listing their own search ranking factors and AppleBot user agent details. They also mention this when John Giannandrea moved from Google to Apple in 2018.

    The big question is, what does that mean? Will that just mean Siri will answer questions better, or will Apple crawl and index the web more heavily? So, do you think Apple can compete with Google or Microsoft Bing and if so, will they be able to take shares from Google?

    As FYI, Google paid Apple in 2021 $15 billion to be the default search engine on Apple Safari. It is obviously very valuable for Google to control Apple Search.

    Hat tip:

    Discussion forum on Twitter.