Apple Confirms 'Applebot' as In-House Web Crawler for Services Like Siri and Spotlight

HobeSoundDarryl said:

And, as I said earlier, if we are going to try to imply that massive sales makes the seller very right, the drug and tobacco sellers are also apparently very right.

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Extremely odd that you would try and compare Apple's (or any successful company, for that matter) underlying reasons for success and good financials, i.e. continuously pleasing customers by providing products that delight and are helpful to people, with tobacco and drug companies.

From my perspective that's terrible as drug and tobacco companies make products that hurt and kill people.

I suspect you won't have many that agree with your linkage attempt.

This is quiet interesting if you think about it. Apple is being sneaky...

Sure it all seems harmless, they are just indexing the web in order to help their product perform better.


With them already providing Website suggestions in Safari, they are potentially slowly taking away from people going to Google.
If Spotlight results start to compare to Google results why would people even bother opening navigating to google.com?

T'hain Esh Kelch said:

If they plan on making a search engine as good as the comparable Maps experience, then, well, I think I will stick to Google.

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Just out of curiosity, what exactly is bad about Apple Maps at this point? The only reason I use Google Maps any more is for bike directions (and for StreetView if I'm apartment hunting) and I don't miss it at all.

Crzyrio said:

If Spotlight results start to compare to Google results why would people even bother opening navigating to google.com?

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Choice, comparison, check accuracy between sites, different results.

AngerDanger said:

Would you guys be willing to start a trio with me called The Overkillers?

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If you're included wouldn't it be a quartet?

hemanwomanhater said:

Just out of curiosity, what exactly is bad about Apple Maps at this point? The only reason I use Google Maps any more is for bike directions (and for StreetView if I'm apartment hunting) and I don't miss it at all.

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Plenty of errors and no walking tracks.

japanime said:

Perhaps that's because it launches by default when iOS invokes a map?



I launched Apple Maps (which was released in September 2012 — hardly a long, long time ago) last week to check something in my city. It still has several things wrong. Google Maps, on the other hand, is pinpoint accurate.

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Yes, and around me, there are things that Google has not had right since 2011, and still not fixed. In rural New Brunswick, they've been wrong every since they came online. Not fixes, ever.

So, what does that prove exactly? My experience with Google is worse than with Apple Maps. Does that mean Google Map is broken everywhere? Who knows. I just know that it doesn't work for me in those places.

If Google maps is fine around you, well great, use it; but that doesn't demonstrate anything either way.

citysnaps said:

Extremely odd that you would try and compare Apple's (or any successful company, for that matter) underlying reasons for success and good financials, i.e. continuously pleasing customers by providing products that delight and are helpful to people, with tobacco and drug companies.

From my perspective that's terrible as drug and tobacco companies make products that hurt and kill people.

I suspect you won't have many that agree with your linkage attempt.

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Whatever. YOU are the one implying that huge sales means Apple is always right. So I offer another kind of huge sales that obviously doesn't connect with "always right." And of course, you twist it to try to make it mean something else. No surprise.

Again, I'm happy for you that Maps has never failed you in 2 years and you've had generations of iDevices that have never crashed. I wish my experiences with Maps and iDevices was even fractionally as good. And because of my experience, I wish I had a greater sense of Apple being more focused rather than appearing to run off on tangents as implied by the subject of this thread.

Are they right or wrong to be working on something like this? I don't know. But apparently a profound volume of buying implies that they are very right... in just about anything they might choose to do. All hail the Apple!

HobeSoundDarryl said:

Whatever. YOU are the one implying that huge sales means Apple is always right.

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There you go again, making stuff up that I never alluded to. A sign of desperation.

What I said is that Apple's repetitive outstanding quarterly numbers are the result of customers being pleased with Apple products. Conversely, if customers were unhappy, they'd be unwilling to open their wallets and purchase new products - resulting in poor quarterly performance.

It's a pretty simple concept, true with most companies.

For some reason, you need to twist that into bizarre edge case citing tobacco companies, whose product in the end many times results in sickness and death. Weird...

I used the word "implied". I'm sometimes unhappy with Apples products when they let me down (like Maps does sometimes and when my iDevices crash at inopportune times). But that doesn't stop me from buying Apple products. I just put up with the bugs . So it's not true that unhappy customers are unwilling to open their wallets. We just tolerate select bugs and crashes as part of a generally positive experience overall.

Back to point: because of that experience, I'd like it to get better. One way to get better is focus. One way to focus is not allocating resources to what can seem like tangents like the subject of this thread. I concede that this may be a very important thing for Apple to be doing but there sure seems to be a lot of such tangents, away from the old mantra of "focus on a few things and do them really well".

Apple is too big to focus on as few as whatever "few" used to mean. But lately, it feels like Apple is all over the place... that "few" has not roughly scaled with Apple growth but been multiplied. IMO, I'd much rather have a debugged iOS 8 than another search algorithm. There's plenty of options for the latter out there so a buggy search can be fixed by switching to someone else. Apple is the ONLY source that can debug iOS.

bbeagle said:

Apple is worth TWICE what Google is worth

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Completely irrelevant.

the8thark said:

google search though is just a paid service where google chooses some of the higher bidders to get better search results. It's not an unbiased internet search.

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The general Google search functionality does not work like this. Do you have anything to back up your claim? Or are you talking about the ads at the top/side of search results which are separate and clearly marked as paid spots?

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ChristianJapan said:

But it will take some years for them to beat Google on its core competence.

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Or, as is much more likely, they never will beat Google in search..

mdelvecchio said:

...that will only have continued to get worse for GM on iOS.

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Whats your source?

I know plenty of people who initially went over to Apple Maps as they were curious (which would have shown up in your article) but have since returned to Google Maps after they realised how badly Apple Maps sucked and still sucks.

Add to this that Android has increased in market share over the last few years and I really start to wonder what you are talking about.

hemanwomanhater said:

Just out of curiosity, what exactly is bad about Apple Maps at this point? The only reason I use Google Maps any more is for bike directions (and for StreetView if I'm apartment hunting) and I don't miss it at all.

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Gmaps blows Apple Maps away in almost all areas.

1. Street view
2. Walking/cycling routing
3. Better public transport in most areas
4. Better traffic time calculations and routing
5. Much more detail of non-road areas (such as pathways in parks)
6. Much better, more detailed and more up to date POI database
7. Crowd sourced information from Waze integration.
8. Better Satellite images in most locations.
9. More accurate/useful location search results (ie better algorithm).
10. Internal maps of shopping centres and other locations.

HobeSoundDarryl said:

Are you implying Apple doesn't "abuse" it's powers as lord of iDevices and iOS?

If the point was about Google Maps for iOS leading to Apple Maps, if you go back and read the actual details, it was never about holding back features for the iDevice version... just that Google wanted a better deal from Apple. Instead of Apple paying for the best, they decided to roll their own. We users still pay the price each time Apple Maps takes us to wrong place and we pull up Google Maps to get us to the right place (just happened to me again yesterday).

Does Google sometimes flex it's muscles in pursuit of more revenue & profit? Certainly. But so does Apple. I don't see one as more of an abuser than another- just two very capable companies good at what they do trying to be as successful as they can be... even if sometimes we- their users- are the casualties of the decisions they make.

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What the hell are you talking about?

Read the EU report. Googles entire business model is extremely anti-competative with maps, reviews, shopping, ect.by providing inorganic search/pay to play search results.

What are you talking about? I said nothing about either company being anti-competitive. That wasn't even remotely connected to the point of my post.

thekeyring said:

Steve Jobs saw Android as Google's attempt to kill the iPhone. Could this be the retaliation - Apple Search as an attempt to kill Google?

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Both claims are wrong, Android was not an attempt to kill iPhone and this Web crawler is not an attempt to kill Google

Oletros said:

Both claims are wrong, Android was not an attempt to kill iPhone and this Web crawler is not an attempt to kill Google

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The first (and only) claim was that Steve Jobs said: with Android, Google wanted to kill iPhone. This claim is right, Steve Jobs did say that.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/apple-ceo-google-wants-to-kill-the-iphone-34763

The second was a question, a speculation: "Is this Apple going after Google?" not a claim that Apple were going after Google.

thekeyring said:

The first (and only) claim was that Steve Jobs said: with Android, Google wanted to kill iPhone. This claim is right, Steve Jobs did say that.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/apple-ceo-google-wants-to-kill-the-iphone-34763

The second was a question, a speculation: "Is this Apple going after Google?" not a claim that Apple were going after Google.

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I know that Jobs said that, what is wrong is his claim, not what you said

Oletros said:

I know that Jobs said that, what is wrong is his claim, not what you said

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Ah fair enough. I tried to phrase the original comment including Jobs because it doesn't matter - in many ways - what Googles intentions are with Android.

If Jobs' belief is shared by Cook & Co then they might try and attack Google.

Tim Cook strikes me as the type of man who plays a long game. For two years he sat through doubts about his leadership and Android gaining market share and then release the iPhone 6 causing huge, huge gains for iPhone. That wasn't a panicked lash out response to Android, but a calm planned one.

If he wants to cripple Google, then ensuring less people use Search is something I can see him doing. However, I think that will be through Spotlight and Siri, and not an 'AppleSearch.com' type of website.

tennisproha said:

Have you used Apple Maps lately? It's pretty incredible now.

what you're referencing was a long long time ago.

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It isn't incredible. It's laughable. Google Maps still kicks it to the curb. For some reason, Apple Maps still thinks there is a bank down my road. There isn't. It's a co-op.

AngerDanger said:

It was mentioned in the article.

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Oh ok, the article said so, so no need to use your own common sense then.

roadbloc said:

It isn't incredible. It's laughable. Google Maps still kicks it to the curb. For some reason, Apple Maps still thinks there is a bank down my road. There isn't. It's a co-op.

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Oh gimme a break man. Google Maps had a myriad of these problems in its infancy and for the longest time afterwards. Its like any new technology.