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Comment by bcherny | Hacker News Reader

I’m hearing a lot of theories in this thread about Apple building a search product.

Yes, that’s possible, but Applebot is used in a lot of ways today that are wholly unrelated to search. (If search consists of crawling, indexing, ranking, retrieval, frontend, etc., Applebot only does the crawling part.)

Applebot is used for generating attachment previews in iMessage (eg. Send someone a URL — the preview is from Applebot crawling it). From the docs, it sounds like it’s also used for similar previews in Siri.

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Applebot was built for crawling web pages, to be used for search results in Spotlight and Siri. That user agent might also be used for attachment previews, but the original intent of Applebot was for search indexing.

Pretty neat, likely the Applebot preview functionality that let us build Rapbits on iMessage: https://rapbits.com/video/ad.mp4

> Applebot is used for generating attachment previews in iMessage (eg. Send someone a URL — the preview is from Applebot crawling it)

Is this true? I would have assumed that would be done locally on device. The preview image, for example, is what's designated by the Open Graph[0] og:image tag.

[0]: https://ogp.me

Crawling and caching is pretty common for any service that offers unfurled previews to avoid sending extra traffic to sites that may not be able to handle it, and in many cases I'd imagine retrieving the pre-extracted cached version to be faster.

Apple is 100% building a search engine.

But do you remember when Apple launched their maps? A decade later and it's still not nearly as good as Google maps. But it's "good enough". I imagine that's what they're going for with this new search service

The data that Apple previously paid TomTom and others to use was certainly subpar compared to Google's data.

However, Apple started collecting their own data in 2015, and rolling out their own maps in 2018.

>Apple is filling its map with so many [details] that Google now looks empty in comparison and all of these details create the impression that Apple hasn’t just closed the gap with Google—but has, in many ways, exceeded it.

https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps

Apple's map data now covers the US and its territories and data for the UK and Ireland are currently in testing.

https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps-expansion-9

I'm totally fine with good enough if it keeps Google in check

The quality of the product is irrelvant. It will have usage as long as it is the default on Apple devices.

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