Job Listings Spark Speculation of Unlikely Full-Fledged Apple Search Engine
Apple on Monday posted a listing to its Jobs at Apple page describing an Engineering Project Manager position for "Apple Search," sparking speculation the company could be working on a full-fledged search engine for use on OS X and iOS platforms.
As first highlighted by Cult of Mac, the most recent position would be based in San Francisco and asks for applicants who are "technical, driven and creative," with the ability to "manage back end operations projects for a search platform supporting hundreds of millions of users." Though Apple's website lists the job as posted February 2, 2015, entries on other job sites indicate it was originally posted on November 19, 2014.
Though the wording appears to hint at a new service, in all likelihood the job's parameters are covering Apple's already-existing search platform, largely embodied in Spotlight. Another job, posted in mid-January, supports the Spotlight probability thanks to frequent mentions of the updated Spotlight Suggestions service.
While gaining attention thanks to the use of the term "Apple Search," the new listings are less likely to be aimed at an entirely new Apple-based search engine and more likely cover ongoing efforts to improve Spotlight. Job listings have in the past hinted at the company's work on upcoming projects, but most of the time - as with patents - they are more of an intriguing tease into what may or may not be going on behind the scenes.
Apple is facing some search engine decisions this year, however, with Google's search engine contract with Apple reportedly set to expire in 2015. That is most likely to be resolved, however, by an extension of the contract for an additional term or perhaps a shift to another provider such as Yahoo or Microsoft, both of which are reportedly lobbying for the lucrative deal.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Top Rated Comments
I think if you were to use the Apple Search to lookup Apple Maps, the universe would un-do itself.
Yeah yeah I know the search thing is highly unlikely.