Apple has recently announced the acquisition of Siri, an application that includes voice recognition and search capabilities.

As some experts suggest (see John Battelle’s blog), Apple could be looking for a search engine for its App Store. As of April 8, 2010, there are at least 185,000 third-party applications available on the App Store.

The engine should not crawl the web and will not be a competitor of Google; it will suggests applications and services to be download/bought, according to the user interaction with the device.

Battelle gives the example of searching for “Chicago rental car”. The engine could suggest an alternative service like “Chicago Transit” that will allow the user to save money, since saving money was one of the target the user set in an application like Mint.

Even if these are just rumours, the guess makes sense; IPhone users already spend more time interacting with applications than the browser and it is likely that with IPad this time will further increase.

This trend matches with the mission of SeCo. Search will no longer be just a matter of the web but will involve data at any level (social, enterprise and personal). Moreover, personalization of the search process will be a key and irremissible feature of search engines in the near future.