Apple plans to upgrade the App Store’s search engine, and it might not stop there

According to the newsletter, former Google executive John Giannandrea’s search team is working to bake the internally-named “Pegasus” search engine more deeply into iOS and macOS and could even use generative AI tools to enhance it further. Last year Apple also launched Business Connect, a tool that helped strengthen its information database with details about businesses’ hours and locations in a way that could help it compete with Google.

Gurman points out that although Apple’s Spotlight and app search engine isn’t as powerful as Google’s, it has a robust App Store ads business that serves ads to its other apps, like Apple News and Weather. Those things combined give Apple enough pieces to launch its own search engine, perhaps sooner rather than later.