It is safe to say Google and Apple like to compete on most things, phones, tablets, but one step Apple has not yet competed with is Google Search, but recent news has come to light that Apple may just be creating their very own search engine to compete with the likes of Google and Yahoo to take a little slice of the Search Engine market place.
Now this is by no means an easy feat, as Google is now a well known brand, and THE top search engine globally. Gone are the days of MSN and Ask Jeeves taking a big market share of the Search Engine world, as Google has now dominated this sector for many years now, and is constantly increasing in popularity.
Now there was increasing speculation on what Apple are actually doing with their Applebot, but recently Apple have released a help document which outlines that Apple intend to use their web crawler for Siri and Spotlight suggestions on Apple devices.
Like any other search engine, Applebot will use the standard robots.txt file rules and robot meta tags. If you do not specifically mention Applebot in your robots.txt or meta tags, Apple will follow the same rules set as Googlebot in crawling your website.
But it does not just end at Spotlight and Siri, according to Apple Insider, they are actually trying to concentrate on jumping into the Search Engine market, as Apple seem to be increasing their internal search team. So having Applebot start small behind the screens gathering as much information as possible before a fully blown search engine can be released. So it does appear that Apple is trying to take away some of the market share off Google in a massive search engine shake up.
So what does this mean for SEO and PPC – well we cannot really speculate on any of this just yet, as most things Apple, there is little to no information online about what exactly the Applebot is looking for. It will not be until Apple release their search engine to the public that we can then try to gain inside knowledge of how the crawler algorithm works. Watch this space….