AppleInsider has reported that Apple plans to compete with the search engine giants of Google & Bing with their own search engine, Spotlight. Apples search team is being led by the team involved with Topsy, whom Google purchased in 2013 for over $200 million.
Just recently we learned that Apple has there own web crawler called AppleBot. This allows Apple to index pages without having to use a third party search provider. AppleInsider believes there is enough evidence to conclude that Google is putting all there chips into Spotlight. With Googles purchase of Topsy, to over a dozen current job listings for positions on the team, there certainly seams to something brewing.
Considering that Google has been the default browser of Apple devices for years, this could be a huge story. With Apple switching their default browser, Google stands to initially lose out on almost hundreds of Millions of people searching on Apple Devices. We do assume there will be an option to change the default search engine back to Google but with Apples tight restrictions of altering default settings, we can never be too sure. It is expected users with be too lazy to switch back and many will enjoy the new search engine as well.
For Apple users and Search Engine Optimizers, this will surely be something we will need to monitor moving forward.