First uncovered by Cult of Mac, Apple has posted an ad seeking an “Engineering Project Manager – Apple Search” on its job board. The first paragraph in the employment ad spells out what Apple is trying to do.
“Apple seeks a technical, driven and creative program manager to manage backend operations projects for a search platform supporting hundreds of millions of users. Play a part in revolutionizing how people use their computers and mobile devices. Manage operational projects that support groundbreaking technology and the most scalable big-data systems in existence,” the ad states.
Apple is probably not building a search engine from scratch to compete with Google and Bing, although the idea can’t be discounted. Competing against companies that have already built the infrastructure would be difficult for any company, at this point.
“For most online businesses and web users, Google will remain the dominant player in the search industry for the next few years at least,” says Chris Rowe, CEO of internet marketing firm JetDM.
Skeptics of the Apple search engine have also pointed out that it might just be an enhancement for existing apps and operating systems to make it easier to search for already existing documents, apps, etc. on the cloud.
“It would be really out of place,” said Benjamin Spiegel, GroupM’s director of strategy, to Search Engine Watch. “Apple is all about expanding its ecosystem and getting further into your household. Search doesn’t really fit into that ecosystem.”
However, this is the final year in the five-year span of Google being the default search engine for Apple’s Safari browser. Safari currently accounts for ten percent of the browser share in the United States. Microsoft has been reported to be in talks with Apple about replacing Google with Bing on the Safari browser, Bing is currently the default search engine on Siri.
Adding fuel to the fire that Apple might be developing its own search engine, the company hired William Stasior, a search engine expert, in 2012 and a web crawler bot was discovered by Jan Moesen in 2013 that Apple developed and unleashed to find out, still unknown, information.
