Several developers have recently seen an increase in the activity of Apple’s web crawler Applebot in their website logs, which has once again triggered speculation that Apple may plan to launch a mature search engine. However, it is more likely that these crawling activities should be related to Apple’s work to improve Siri and Spotlight search results .
Jon Henshaw, the founder of digital marketing insight company Coywolf, said in a blog post this week that Applebot has started crawling his website regularly every day, which he hadn’t noticed before. And on Twitter, Stack Overflow engineer Nick Craver and digital marketing consultant Michael James Field also noticed a surge in Applebot crawls on their supervised websites in recent days.
Like other web crawlers, Applebot also scans the web and helps determine the ranking of search results based on several factors, including user engagement, the relevance and match between search terms and web page topics and content, and web pages obtained from other websites The number of links, and the design features of the page.
As Henshaw pointed out, Apple updated the Applebot support document in July, adding new details.
-Added how to verify Applebot’s traffic
-Expanded the details of the Applebot user agent, including the difference between the desktop version and the mobile version
-Extended robots.txt rules
-Added a section to explain that they can not only crawl HTML, but also render pages similar to Google.
-Added a section about search rankings and factors affecting the ranking of web search results.
Given that Apple advertises itself as a privacy-conscious company and does not have an advertising or data-driven business model like Google or Facebook, it is not certain whether it will want to launch a mature search engine.
Since at least 2015, rumors of Apple launching a search engine have emerged, when Apple confirmed its Applebot for the first time and released a series of search-related job recruitment.
For now, Applebot may still be committed to improving Siri and Spotlight search results, as Apple said in its supporting documents.Naijatechnews.com learned that in the WWDC keynote speech in June, Apple said that the number of facts Siri can provide is more than 20 times that of three years ago.
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