On the job openings page of its official website, Apple posted a listing for a position named Engineering Project Manager - Apple Search, signaling that the company could be entering the search engine business.
According to the listing, which was first reported by Apple news website Cult of Mac, the hired individual for the position will be based in San Francisco. The employee will serve as the program manager for overseeing the backend operations of a "search platform supporting hundreds of millions of users."
The job listing also notes that the person to be hired for the position will "play a part in revolutionizing how people use their computers and mobile devices."
If Apple is really considering entering the search engine industry, it would be such a late arrival. However, Apple has been known to delay their entry into businesses, as seen in the company's April 2015 release of the much-anticipated Apple Watch while rival companies have already released several versions of the wearable device.
Apple has had plans to enter the search engine industry for some time, with Gene Munster, an analyst for Piper Jaffray, having claimed back in 2010 that there is a 70 percent possibility that Apple will be entering the business of mobile search engines after five years.
Munster's predictions, which imply that the company will be making its move this year, are supported by decisions that Apple has made over the past few years. In late 2012, the company hired William Stasior, a prominent search specialist that has worked with AltaVista and Amazon. Then in 2014, a developer named Jan Moesen uncovered a web-crawling bot that came from the servers of Apple.
Apple has also launched the Siri next-generation search technology, which has been internally called as a "do engine" instead of simply a "search engine" because of the software's ability to create actions that utilize the search results that it was instructed to look up. In addition, Apple updated the Spotlight Search feature in the recently released OS X Yosemite.
While the posted job opening may in fact be related to Spotlight Search or other apps such as the App Store, and not a full-blown search engine, it is worth noting that the search agreement between Apple and Google for the company's Safari Internet browser is set to expire in 2015.
If Apple decides to create its own search engine and break ties with Google for its Safari browser, the decision could prove to have a big impact on Google. When Mozilla decided to remove Google as Firefox's default search service, the market share of Google drastically dropped within Firefox from 82 percent to 64 percent.
