• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 14, 2017

It's estimated that Google will pay Apple $3 billion in 2017 to remain the default search engine on iOS devices.

A.M. (Toni) Sacconaghi Jr., a Wall Street analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, wrote in a research note published Monday to investors that the $3 billion licensing fee Apple will likely incur this year is up from the $1 billion the company paid in 2014.

Apple’s products account for about half of Google’s mobile search revenue, per Sacconaghi, CNBC reports.

The analyst firm believes Google's licensing fees for search make up a large part of Apple's services business.

Google is not the only engine powering search for Apple. Microsoft Bing also powers Siri and Spotlight for Apple, which has been working to build up its own support for search.

In fact, Apple has about 459 open jobs related to "search," from Search Ads platform specialist in marketing to Search Engineers in its software engineering department in Santa Clara Valley.  

These openings either have the keyword "search" in the job title, in the description or as a key qualification to apply for the position. The latter makes the positions even more interesting. For example, most of the required qualifications that are typically listed for this Senior Data Scientist position include strength in Machine Learning, Statistical Modeling, Data Mining, Pattern Recognition, Information Retrieval, and Natural Language Processing. Or, per the job post, the position calls for someone with strength in Search Ranking.

There are about a dozen open positions for data scientists working with Siri, and at least two that will focus on crunching numbers in real-time in Spotlight Suggestions, which shows suggestions from the Internet, iTunes, and the App Store, movie showtimes, and nearby locations, among other locations.