Apple, Facebook, and Mozilla — some of the biggest names in the industry making waves with updates and plans for the future. Here is this week’s roundup of search-related news.

Facebook Launches New Local Search and Discovery Tool

Facebook introduced Places, their own discovery tool for local search. The social network uses its Graph search, page locations API, and other features to help users search for restaurants, hotels, landmarks, and other establishments.

Users will only need to search for a specific city, and they will be directed to that city’s page, along with suggestions. Results are curated, as it will also display if other friends have been there along with their reviews.

While the common question of “Do Facebook Likes help SEO?” still won’t have a definitive answer, this new feature should emphasize the importance of having a strong social presence.

Apple Building Its Own Search Engine?

A web development expert alerted the Twitterverse about Apple running a web crawler, using the Go programming language.

This has led many users to ask if Apple is building its own search engine. The tech giant is reportedly crawling mostly mobile sites with apps in the App Store. If that’s the case, it would likely be a blow to Bing, which currently powers Siri.

Others say it could be related to iOS 8 and Apple’s new Mac OS X Yosemite. Of course, these are all speculations until we hear directly from Apple.

Mozilla Marks 10th Anniversary with New Feature Releases

A decade after it hit the Internet, Mozilla Firefox is still going strong. For their 10th anniversary, the company has launched new browser features, including:
DuckDuckGo as a pre-installed search option in Firefox; and
A new “Forget” feature—their own version of the “clear browsing history” option

Other features and news for their more technical users are detailed in their anniversary announcement.

Keep checking back for more important SEO news and updates.

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