Apple & Chomp; New Marriage Brings Spotlight to Platform-Specific Searching

By Webimax Company | February 28 2012 7:52 AM

It's no secret that web searching has become a major industry, if not the biggest online industry considering searching's place as potentially the most essential online function. With so much time and energy spent on searching the web though, one would expect there to be a number of search engines presenting viable competition with each other to deliver the end-user with the best results. This was the case 10-15 years ago, and may still be again, but Google is undoubtedly the dominate search engine across the globe save for some exceptions (e.g. China and Baidu).

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Bing and Yahoo! are holding steady with a small percentage of overall search and are readying themselves to mount a surge to gain more market share in the years to come. Google, on the other hand, has 84% of the global search market and will likely stay the dominant search engine because of their industry-defining, algorithmic delivery of web search. Whichever the direction web search goes in the years to come, there will always be a need for search engine optimization requiring expert SEO companies to optimize businesses' web presence.

Now, with Apple acquiring Chomp this week, a tech start-up whose software allows people to search hundreds of thousands of applications (apps) for Apple and Android devices, platform-specific searching could become a growing function. Developers have offered criticism towards Apple for the apparent inefficiencies that exist with the search functionality of the Apple App Store where customers sometimes struggle to find apps from the search queries they enter. As a result, some have found it difficult to navigate beyond the apps that receive profiled attention in the store. Chomp set out to improve this process and was successful.

Now it is unclear what Apple, who paid roughly $50 million for the start-up, plans to do with the acquisition. However, the move by Apple illustrates the value of Chomp's innovative software and brings to light the future potential for further innovation in platform-specific searching (like that experienced in the App store). With the growth in smartphones, App store searching will only become more important and similar searches beyond that experienced with the search engine may also become more relevant. As such, a new dimension of search optimization may develop that SEO companies could adapt to in order to offer a wider spectrum of services. We shall see in the months and years to come whether Apple takes their Chomp acquisition in this direction.