After being recognized worldwide as the top search engine for the past two decades, Google’s dominance of the search engine landscape could be under threat with reports that Apple is in the process of creating its own search engine.

Google currently pays Apple between $8-$12 billion dollars per year to be the default search engine of iPhones, according to a recent report in The New York Times.

As of 2018, Scottish software engineer John Giannandrea left Google and joined Apple to oversee the strategy for artificial intelligence and machine learning across the company and development of Core ML and Siri technologies. His hire was supposedly to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities, but also brought eight years of experience running the world’s most popular search engine.

The company has been openly recruiting search engineers since, to the point where Apple has a “credible team” to “build a more general search engine”, according to a former Google engineering chief, Bill Coughran.

Speculation about plans for an Apple search engine to compete with Google has been around for many years now, ever since the company was first seen to be using its own web crawler back in 2014. Apple confirmed the existence of the Applebot crawler in 2015.

There are signs that a search engine may already be operational, with webmasters reporting increased activity from Applebot. Applebot’s crawl rate is said to have increased substantially. 

Apple is one of the few companies in the world with the resources to create a search engine to compete with Google.

With a market cap of over $2 trillion and around $200 billion of cash in hand, the company has the ability to not only turn away the money received from Google but to invest in the server infrastructure required to create a competitive search engine.

An Apple search engine would almost certainly have one massive selling point: increased user privacy.

Apple has made great efforts to distance itself from rivals in recent years by insisting that “privacy is a fundamental human right” and one of their “core values”. 

Apple may attempt to build a search engine that doesn’t store personal information nor track users across the web. That would be easier for Apple because, unlike Google, it’s not reliant on advertising income, which benefits from personalized data with which to target users.

The big question is whether Apple would look to open up a search engine to the world at large or restrict its usage to owners of Apple devices or browsers, making it another reason to buy iPhones, iPads and computers.