Apple plans to expand the integration of its own search engine, which it refers to as 'Pegasus', into more of its own apps for iOS and macOS, including its App Store, in addition to offering results with "greater precision" and strengthening this technology thanks to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). This has been advanced by analyst Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who often has access to exclusive information about Apple projects.
The development team for this proprietary search engine, which Apple has been working on for at least two years, is led by John Ginnandrea, who also oversees machine learning and AI at the company. In fact, Apple is already using this system to offer results in services such as Spotlight, its search system integrated into iOS and macOS that originally served to find files and applications between the brand's devices.
However, some time later, Spotlight was updated to include answers with links to websites that could be useful for the query at hand. In this way, users can directly enter web pages on the Internet from the Spotlight results, in the same way that a regular search engine like Google could do.
Now, Apple plans to more deeply integrate its search engine, known internally as 'Pegasus', into iOS and macOS, using it in applications such as the App Store, in addition to strengthening this technology with its new generative AI tools. According to Bloomberg, in recent years the company has been developing 'Pegasus', a "next-generation" search engine for use internally in iOS and macOS.
The technology company has already been using this search engine not only in Spotlight, but also in Siri results. However, as the analyst has learned, the company intends to include 'Pegasus' in more applications such as the App Store. In addition to showing more precise results thanks to generative AI.
In this context, Gurman also recalled that Apple has been working on its own web crawler called Applebot, which is used internally to obtain search results and websites to later offer them through Siri or Spotlight.
Additionally, Apple has an advertising technology team that performs ad search functions in the App Store. This group is responsible for Apple News ads and advertising for stocks and weather apps. For all these reasons, according to Gurman, Apple could use the skills of this team for advertising in a web search engine.
Thus, although 'Pegasus' search technology is not within reach of the features that Google can offer, Gurman has stressed that Apple can obtain all the pieces to have a complete search engine if it wanted to launch it in the future.
