Strong evidence is mounting that suggests Apple is on the verge of jumping into the search market.
A recent job posting by Apple – as highlighted by CultofMac – shows the company looking for an engineering project manager for ‘Apple Search’.
The posting describes the candidate as managing backend projects for a search platform that supports “hundreds of millions of users”. That certainly sounds like it’ll be a wide rollout…
This latest development comes on top of other search-related evidence that you may or may not be aware of – first, Apple employed William Stasior – a former Amazon and AltaVista search figure, in 2012, before developer Jan Moesen discovered a web-crawling bot last year that looked to come from Apple’s own servers.
Spotlight
These developments may have been seen in Apple’s progression already – OS X Yosemite shipped last year with a much more search-orientated Spotlight feature, allowing users to search quickly and easy for items both on their computers, and online.
Then there’s Siri – Apple’s next-gen search technology that goes further in its search capabilities, acting on search data as opposed to just presenting it.
Bringing this kind of functionality to the web could absolutely rock the market that’s currently dominated by Google.
Search agreement
And then there’s Google’s search agreement with Apple that ensures the search engine is Safari’s default. That agreement is due to end in 2015.
Collecting all this evidence together, it does appear that all roads lead to Cupertino.