As it stands, Apple relies on search engines such as Google and Bing to help provide search results in their apps. However interestingly enough, it seems that one developer has noticed that Apple has recently released their own web crawler which apparently has been in operation since the 15th of October.
Now before you start to think that Apple is going to jump into the search engine business, chances are they aren’t. As noticed by the developer, the web crawler has been requesting for information on HTML pages. It ignores CSS, JavaScript, and image files. So what does this mean then? What is this Apple web crawler’s intentions?
Well according to AppleInsider, the bot has been written in Google’s Go language and it does not operate continuously. Its IP address is part of Apple’s top-level reserved IP block which basically means that it is originating from Apple’s servers. It has been speculated that perhaps the web crawler has been designed to help both Siri and Spotlight to grab more information on the web, thus improving their capabilities.
There is some sound reasoning behind this move as it could allow Apple to offer enhanced privacy as well as avoid monetizing search results provided by Google or Bing. Of course this is just speculation because for all we know, it could simply be a project/experiment by Apple’s employees.
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