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The Apple Search Bot is Actually a Crawler to Improve Siri Not New Search Engine

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apple crawler
Everyone was buzzing earlier this week with rumors that Apple was crawling the web.    It began popping up in the middle of October with Apple’s IP range with a NetName of APPLE-WWNET as “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Fetcher/0.1)” written in Go.

The crawler does request robots.txt and is still actively crawling.  But the crawler is only taking straight HTML and not the CSS, JavaScript or image files.  While many crawlers don’t download CSS or JavaScript, the fact it was not indexing image files was interesting.

Of course, it had everyone speculating over the possibility that Apple might be getting into the search engine game, despite their current partnerships to provide search for iOS and Siri.  With Apple’s following and iOS default search, Apple could definitely make some inroads into creating their own search engine.

Here was the example log file from Jan Moesen.

    17.147.18.35 - - [06/Nov/2014:08:10:29 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 185 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Fetcher/0.1)"
    17.147.18.35 - - [06/Nov/2014:08:10:30 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 403 "http://www.catenacycling.com/robots.txt" "Go 1.1 package http"
    17.147.18.35 - - [06/Nov/2014:08:10:36 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 301 185 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Fetcher/0.1)"
    17.147.18.35 - - [06/Nov/2014:08:10:40 +0100] "GET /en HTTP/1.1" 200 93350 "http://www.catenacycling.com" "Go 1.1 package http"
    17.147.18.35 - - [06/Nov/2014:08:11:03 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 403 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Fetcher/0.1)"
    17.147.18.35 - - [06/Nov/2014:08:11:05 +0100] "GET /en/ride-the-world/routes HTTP/1.1" 200 6379 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Fetcher/0.1)"
    17.147.18.35 - - [06/Nov/2014:08:11:09 +0100] "GET /en/ride-the-world/climbs HTTP/1.1" 200 6841 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Fetcher/0.1)"
    17.147.18.35 - - [06/Nov/2014:08:11:14 +0100] "GET /en/calendar/events HTTP/1.1" 200 9333 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Fetcher/0.1)"

But it would appear that the reality isn’t nearly as sexy as the possibility that Apple is laying down groundwork for a brand new search engine.  It is actually used by data scientists using statistical analysis and machine learning to improve Siri’s accuracy and performance.

So while we may see Apple one day jump into the search engine game, this crawler isn’t a part of it at this time.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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Comments

  1. I disagree with your conclusion. To me “using statistical analysis and machine learning to improve SIRI” does not imply Apple is not building a search engine. SIRI is a search engine.