Tech industry watchers speculated this week that Apple is developing its own search engine to challenge Google, which has 92.8 percent of the global search engine market. If true, it would likely focus on protecting your privacy, something Google's business model does not do.

Jon Henshaw, founder of digital marketing insights company Coywolf, kicked off the buzz with a blog post noting increased crawl activity on Applebot and a surge in job postings for search engineers.

“At this point, everything is observational and speculative,” Henshaw wrote. “They may never release a search engine. It’s also possible that iOS, iPadOS, and macOS users are using it and not even realize it. It could be so tightly integrated into the OS and native apps that alerts and Spotlight searches slowly steal searches that would otherwise be done on Google.”

An Apple-developed search engine would likely create a more private browsing experience compared to Google, where every ounce of user data is analyzed, processed, categorized, and sold on the open market under the guise of marketing and sales.