Search Engine

Rumors that Apple might be creating its own search engine started doing the rounds last fall, when webmasters started seeing web crawler visits from IP addresses starting with 17 – the IP address block owned entirely by Apple. Apple has now officially confirmed in a support document that it is operating its own web crawler called Applebot.

Applebot is the web crawler for Apple, used by products including Siri and Spotlight Suggestions. It respects customary robots.txt rules and robots meta tags. It originates in the 17.0.0.0 net block.

While the wording is clearly intended to suggest that this is just business as usual, both the fact that Apple is running its own web crawler at all, and the somewhat vague wording, are interesting … 
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At this point, it seems pretty obvious that Google means business with the Google Plus platform. Besides all of the other areas Plus has engulfed, it looks like Google is heading into the gaming realm.  The above snippet was found in the Plus web page code

“have sent you invites and more from Google+ Games”

So now Google is taking on Microsoft’s Xbox and Apple’s Gamecenter? Perhaps Google might want to lower the barrier to entry.
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