In the latest advancement in the tech world, Apple Inc. unveiled the release of Applebot on 5th May, 2015. Applebot is the newest entrant in the field of online search creating speculations in the online world. Apple has added a new web page in its support website mentioning about its first web crawler, “Applebot”. The crawler’s existence has been identified last November but its official announcement was featured on the website recently. Noteworthy, the company’s deal with Google to use the latter’s search engine is getting expired soon.
Web Crawlers extract data from websites to gain strategic advantages. Googlebot is the most renowned web crawler that follows links on web pages and moves from one link to another and brings data back to Google’s servers. Applebot is the web crawler for Apple Inc. empowering services including Siri and Spotlight on different iOS platforms.
Researchers observed “Applebot” crawling web pages from November 2014. Most people assumed that SIRI and SPOTLIGHT employs third-party search engines like Google or Bing to search information on the web. With the launch of Applebot, this assumption doesn’t hold valid anymore. However, Apple Inc. has still not revealed how long it has been using its crawler in live environment.
Applebot was first noticed by Jan Moesen, a developer during November, 2014. He noticed several web hits from a crawler indexing the block with an IP address starting from “17.0.0.0” net block owned and operated by Apple. This led to cancellation of a contract between Apple and Google for a search engine deal embarking the rumors of Apple’s own web crawler.
Researchers and IT analysts believe Applebot is not a threat to Google yet. Apple users would not be able to even observe any difference as interface will be the same as before. Applebot will put its stepping stone towards providing online search. Apple Inc. is an established name in the field of mobile devices and operating systems. Its expansion in the field of search is quite plausible. The search sector is dominated by Google with around 70 percent of searches carried out in Google and 20 percent being the share of Bing.
Googlebot employs an algorithmic process involving computer programs to crawl web page URLs, generated from different crawl processes along with site map data. As Googlebot crawls the websites, it detects links on each page and adds them to the list of websites to be crawled. Thereafter, the crawled information is processed and added to searchable index if the content is of high quality.
