Okay.
Right from the start, I’ll put my hand up and say that this has all been speculated before, and that I don’t have any REAL lead on this, but is Apple seeking to launch its own search engine to compete with Google and Bing?
The simple answer is “who the hell knows?”
However, over the weekend I noticed some interesting activity in the logs for this website, with the apparent repeated polling of it from a single IP address over the last couple of weeks.
Now, I’ve blanked out the complete IP address for privacy’s sake, but the 17.x.x.x range from which this polling came from belongs to Apple themselves.
Notice that the polling is quite regular – every 20 minutes. They’ve only hit the main page, and nothing below, so maybe whatever it is about is just in testing.
Or it’s about nothing at all.
Every 20 minutes does seem a really small interval. Yahoo – (who crawl my site far more often than even Google) – doesn’t usually come by anything more than a few times a day.
Given the pendulous regularity, it does look like some kind of robot activity. I’ve not had an Apple related article on my front page for quite a long time.
It might mean something – though it probably means nothing. It’s just curious.
Anyone else seen similar activity?