It has long been known that Google paid Apple in order to remain the default search for iOS, but how much was always a question mark. But thanks to a legal case between Oracle and Google, we now know just how much. Bloomberg reports that in 2014, Google paid Apple $1 billion dollars for the […]
Apple’s Applebot Follows Googlebot’s Instructions in Robots.txt Files
John Mueller from Google pointed out an interesting fact about Apple’s Applebot – if a robots.txt file makes no mention of Applebot, but does mention Googlebot, the Applebot will follow the same instructions as for Googlebot. Apple’s Applebot is used for both Siri and Spotlight Suggestions for iOS users. What if you do not want […]
iOS 9 Content Blocking Loads Pages 3.9X Faster
There has been a lot of talk about the upcoming iOS having content blockers – aka ad blocker – and TheNextWeb has brought attention to some interesting tests being done with iOS beta and focusing on ad blocking technology that is included with it… and it should scare anyone who makes money with online advertising. […]
Safari & iOS 9 With New Ad Blocking API Functionality
One of the surprises about iOS 9 is the addition of ad blocking functionality. Many are viewing this as a shot directly at Google, as this new functionality could have a serious impact on their mobile ad revenue. The official name is “Content Blocking Safari Extensions”, which is described as giving developers the ability to […]
Apple Officially Acknowledges Their Applebot Web Crawler
Apple seems to have finally officially acknowledged their “Applebot” webcrawler with a new webpage added to their support site this week. Apple is using this crawler for both Siri and Spotlight Suggestions, among other products. User-agent strings will contain “Applebot” together with additional agent information. For example: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 […]
Google Adds iOS App Information in Google Search Results
Looks like Google Play wasn’t the only mobile OS to see some changes with how apps are presented in the search results. iOS users will also see some changes in the Google Search results too. This change only applies to results directly from Apple’s App Store, not for sites talking about apps, whether they are […]
The Apple Search Bot is Actually a Crawler to Improve Siri Not New Search Engine
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 […]