Steve Jobs' lair at Apple headquarters is constantly humming with the activity of his army of engineers, programmers and designers, and one prominent online analyst thinks that Apple's chieftain has his sights set on his company's most recent competition: Google.
Michael Arrington of the leading technical blog TechCrunch.com speculated that Apple was up to something search-related, based mainly on the 6-7 percent market share that the company's Safari web browser currently enjoys. If Apple were to build their own search engine, they could easily plug it into the in-browser search field in Safari that Google presently occupies.
In addition, Arrington felt like Apple might just be bitter.
"Apple can’t be super pleased with Google’s competition to the iPhone with Android," he wrote, referring to Google's mobile operating system. "Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who’s also on Apple’s board of directors, sits out of discussions involving Apple’s mobile strategy, and rumor is he may leave the board."
But finally, Arrington predicted that Apple is working on some kind of search technology – but maybe not a straight-up competitor to Google's mighty search service. After all, Yahoo is Google's closest competitor in search, and their stock recently closed at a dismal $10 a share. Meanwhile, Google's shares cost almost $300 apiece.
Instead, Arrington speculated that Apple is working on a new, more visual search engine that will most likely be powered by Google search results. Perhaps Apple could learn from the fledgling search engine SearchMe.com, which presents its results as full-size images of actual pages.