 Howdy moz fans we're here today to talk about an Apple search engine There's been rumors circulating for a couple of years now that Apple are building a search engine I'm here to convince you. I think they are building a search engine. I think they already launched it But before we get into what does that look like? Let's start off by talking about the common reasons people say Apple won't be building a search engine The first is that we know that Google pay Apple something in the order of 18 to 20 billion dollars a year To be the default search engine on Apple devices That's a lot of cash But if you consider Apple makes more than a billion dollars a day probably not such a big idea as we think it is but more importantly in 2020 the Department of Justice in the US said that they were going to be suing Google for monopoly practices one of the four bullet points they listed as their reasons was that they Don't want Apple being paid by Google to be the default search engine. They believe that's a monopoly practice They wanted to stop so even if Apple do care about the cash, it might be going away anyway So then it was not necessarily a surprise in 2018 We saw the head of search at Google leave and go to Apple Apple hired the head of search That's a very suspicious thing to do if you're not building a search engine We also saw at the same time they started listing job listings for hundreds and hundreds of search engineers which all adds up to building something search related and so Room is circulating. Oh Apple are gonna build a search engine It flew under the radar a little bit, but Apple already launched a web search engine in Ios 14 We're on Ios 16 now Ios 14 launched September 2020 Apple made a change where if you do a search in the Ios default search screen The series suggested websites used to be powered by Google's web index Ios 14 changed it to Apple's own web index They already got a web index and they've got a page on their website Well, they tell us about that web index on that page to describe how their Apple bot works They've got a web crawler that for last three years or so can already render JavaScript something that took Google 20 years or so Before they had that so they've got a mature crawler on that page. They also outline their Search ranking factors the top five search ranking factors they have and it's things like links web page design characteristics, which sounds like core web vitals and page rank And so the search ranking factors look very similar to Google They've got a crawler very similar to Google on their page They talk about how if you've got no Apple bot specific rules in your robots.txt file They'll follow Google bot rules so you can see the direction of travel They're trying to crawl the web in a similar shape to Google But I think that's a distraction I think there are several things that they could do differently if they wanted to build a bigger search engine And we're gonna talk about the three differences I think they could have that would allow them to build a search engine in a very novel way that would compete with Google in a way That we haven't necessarily fully understood So let's talk about that. So the first thing is federated search Consider how you do a search on Google you type in Madrid and it goes and it looks in Google's one giant database that database has a web index and knowledge index and all of that stuff But it's essentially looking in Google's own singular database with Apple is tempting to think okay Well, they've got a much smaller web index than Google they're gonna just go and look in that But what I actually think is they'll use a federated search approach Federated search is when you delegate a search to multiple different providers and then aggregate the results in Apple's case I think they could delegate the search to all the apps on your device And basically you do a search for Madrid and rather than just looking in the web index It might say well this Madrid search the intent might be to book a hotel So I'm gonna look in the hotels.com app the intent might be to book a flight So I'm gonna look in a sky scanner with the Lufthansa app might be learn a language duo lingo It might be get a travel guide So you look at the learning planet app point being that they would ask all of these devices and then blend the results from multiple different sources together But how would they know what apps on your device can cater to what intense in 2020 they rolled out a change To the operating system that allowed apps being installed on your device to register a list of intents that they can cater to Which is very interesting and it seems like 2020 is a year where they started launching a lot of these things and Setting up for this potential search engine And so you get a search that went to their web index But also searched through the apps on your device blended those results together as further evidence that they Will blend these results I manage to reverse engineer the API they use for their web index and when you do searches You get searched one list of results. You don't get web results and knowledge results. You get one big list of results Sorted by relevancy and it might be news web web maps Whatever point being it shows apples thinking they're concerned more of relevancy than where the results came from and they're happy to Blend them together. Okay, so they've got this federated search approach So let's talk about how these searches can also have custom UIs So when they rolled out the Change to allow an app to cater to specific intents that app can also tell the phone Oh, when you're catering to this specific intent, here's a snippet of user interface You can use outside of the app to cater to that in the best possible way as an example If you ask Siri to split a check it understands that the calculator app on your phone can cater to that intent But it doesn't send you to the calculator app instead It shows a little custom UI snippet right there in the search results where it shows you how to split that check And so apps being stored on your phone can say I can deal this sort of intent And this is the best way to present that result to users and it goes one step further At the same time they also launched app clips App clips are what apple described as small parts of an app What's important about app clips is that they get streamed to your device So you can scan a qr code or click a link and it'll go straight into the app clip There's no need to install a full application on your device App clips are designed to do one small part of what a full app would do But basically frictionless in loading them up So an example might be imagine you arrive in a city You've not been there before you're running late and so you do a search for scooter and Rather than just searching the apps on your device because apple have got this database of app clips And I've got almost two and a half million apps in their app store. They could also serve that intent So you search for scooter apple say yes, here's an app clip that can help you with that You press the button you go straight into the app. It directs you to a nearby scooter You pay for it with apple pay get an escutcheon off you go This is a mobile native experience. You didn't go to any website. You didn't install an app Everything happened right inside the search results. So google had been moving to this mobile first paradigm But it's still web first with apple There's potential for a mobile native experience and this is something that google could only dream of What is also true is that this federated search approach would allow apple to completely bypass Google's strengths google's strength are the fact that they got this huge web index And they've been building that for 25 years or whatever with a federated search Approach apple could cater to many of the same intents without needing to replicate Google's web index and their rankings and all of that magic So if you're going to build a search engine, you probably also want to be able to personalize results How apple going to do that especially considering that they've positioned themselves as the sort of privacy-centric tech company So first thing quickly consider the difference between google photos and apple photos on google photos They will do machine learning of all of your photos on their servers in the cloud Allowing you to say oh show me my photos of animals for example You can also do show me my photos of animals with apple photos But all the machine learning happens on your device and it shows the two different paradigms So when you do a search google will serve you some personalized search results Based on your history or whatever it might be But it's all happening in the cloud. What I think apple will do is serve your list of potential results from their web index And then user a and user b would see a different subset of those chosen by their phone Using the machine learning on the device which understands your preferences your history what apps you've got installed etc Final thing is that in terms of personalization apple have a potential advantage here too Because with the federated search approach apple can do what I call fully authenticated personalization If you do a recipe search for a schnitzel recipe on google you'll get some personalized results But it'll be from the web index if you do schnitzel recipe search on your device This federated search approach will allow apple to look into your private databases If you've got the recipe keeper app, it'll see. Oh, yes, you've got a schnitzel recipe in the app I'm going to pull that out. It might see that your mum sent you a message On facebook about best way to make schnitzels so pull that out This is stuff that google can't do google can't look behind the curtain into your private databases Over the last few years, I think apple have been playing a slow game laying the pieces to move towards this mobile native sort of experience So when I first started talking about this research in mid 2022 at the search love Philadelphia conference I predicted that apple would move the search field onto the ios home screen in order to try to change user behavior And pushed them towards doing this mobile native sort of search rather than having users go into a web browser to do a search And then a couple of weeks later apple announced they were doing exactly that and that rolled out in ios 16 september 22 Apple made it so that the search field is right there on your home screen now Trying to push people towards doing this sort of search What that means for us as seos is yet to be seen whether they move in this sort of direction But all the pieces seem to line up if you've got an app. This is definitely something that you should be thinking about Otherwise we should all be thinking about what this means for us over the next couple of years as apple tried to shift the user behavior What that means is still to be seen. Thank you so much