In 2015, Apple first revealed information about AppleBot, its search engine crawler. This was after about a year of SEOs noticing AppleBot in their logfiles. Then a few months ago, Apple updated its information around web search to list its web ranking factors.
Jon Henshaw last week published a very comprehensive blog post on Apple's behind the scenes efforts in launching a search engine to compete with Google. A lot of the stuff we covered in short form, but with more details that make it look real.
Will Apple launch a search engine? I hope so. But will it succeed in taking away real market share from Google?
When Bing launched its search engine in 2009, years before that I thought Microsoft could destroy Google. Keep in mind that was in 2004 and if Microsoft did it in 2004, maybe it would have been true. But that clearly is not the case in 2020. While Bing has some market share, it seems like it took it away from Yahoo and other search engines and very little from Google.
Can Apple take away share from Google? Maybe a little. But you just have to look at the launch of Apple Maps. :)
Here is the poll from Mark Traphagen asking the SEO community about if they think it is something to be excited about:
Re-running this poll to see if we can get more responses (at request from @rustybrick). Please RT!
— Mark Traphagen ✊🏾🏳️🌈 (@marktraphagen) August 28, 2020
One morning soon when you wake up and there’s suddenly an Apple search engine in every Apple device, your reaction will be...
It seems like about 22% feel like this will be a "game changer" but the rest are not too concerned about it.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
