Apple posted a help document on May 5th this week confirming the existence of Applebot – Apple’s own web crawler. According to the help article Applebot is used by various Apple products such as Siri and Spotlight Suggestions; and it follows all robots.txt and robots meta tags rules.
Considering that a TON of people search the web on a daily basis using their Apple devices, I’m sure that Apple is quietly exploring opportunities to enter the search market. The mobile search field still hasn’t really been claimed by anyone – so it’ll be interesting to see what happens here.
For those of you wondering, the Applebot user-agent string will resemble the following:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1)