Perhaps TechCrunch has been bought by Nick Denton and will print anything that any bum in the subway may utter, but that’s probably not likely. But, at first glance, the idea that Apple would be developing a search engine seems ridiculous, with Google dominant, Yahoo begging to be bought, and MSN, Ask.com, and others pathetically grasping at straws in attempts to eat into Google’s staggering market share.

But there may be other ways to look at what “building a search engine” means. Perhaps it’s not what we envision when we think of a search engine–something like Google that lives in your toolbar and points you to organic and paid search results across the entire web. MG Siegler at VentureBeat thinks it may be an attempt to create a lookup engine, like Searchlight, that scours your own files.

Apple has some cash on hand right now and some very impressive money-generating devices out there that promise more growth, even if there is a recession. And they have the iPhone, perhaps their greatest device yet, dominating the smartphone market but with Android likely soon to be breathing down their necks.

What does Android having going for it that Apple doesn’t? Google’s vast search technology and engineers. Word is that Apple is not fully satisfied with the search experience on the iPhone. Apple by nature is wary of relying on others to do what they could accomplish themselves.

But, more importantly, what Google has going with Android is a mobile vehicle to deliver ads. This is where the money is at. If Apple could develop a killer search app (or apps) on its iPhone and piggyback that with their own mobile ad network, they would be raking in money from all over the place. Steve Jobs would buy a throne, a crown, and some diamond encrusted blue jeans.

However, there is no evidence that they are developing an ad network. It’s hard to see the point of building a search engine if you’re just going to let Google put its ads all over it. Perhaps they could use Apple Search to point users more in the direction of Apple products, but it all seems quite pointless without their own ad revenue.

They should just buy Yahoo out from under Microsoft. Wouldn’t that be cool?

But if this report had come from Michael Arrington on April 1st, we’d all be laughing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 9:57 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.