This week Apple acquired a small startup called Mapsense which builds tools to collect, analyze, and visualize large volumes of location data. According to the company’s website, “There are over 10 billion devices on the planet streaming location data on a daily basis…Mapsense’s platform and developer tools help organizations quickly ingest and analyze billions of rows of location data.” Re/code called the acquisition a part of “Apple’s steady stealth campaign to rival Google in maps.” They pointed to Apple’s recent acquisitions of several other location-services companies including “HopStop, a crowd-sourced maps tool” and Coherent Navigation, a high-precision GPS company.

Google’s dominance of digital mapping technology as well as its overall domination of the search engine market has made it a prominent target for other companies. In April, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research branch of the US military, open sourced its advanced search engine platform Memex. Forbes announced that with increasing scrutiny from anti-monopoly watchdogs and the open sourcing of a powerful new search platform, “it might be a propitious time for tech-minded entrepreneurs to start building a Google killer.” 

What is notable about the acquisition of Mapsense, as well as the Forbes story about Memex, is that both platforms are used for the visualization of large data sets. The original intention for the Memex search engine was to assist law enforcement officials with indexing unaccounted parts of the internet and visualizing large amounts of information, including a mapping technology that allows officials to track suspected criminals based on their online trail. The visual interfaces of Memex, called TellFinder and DIG, appear to be very proficient at processing and displaying large sets of data and making them appear both understandable and visually appealing. 

As the internet grows, search technology has to evolve to evaluate large data sets and present search results in a clear and concise manner. Visualization technology may be the difference-maker in the next wave of search engine innovations. Apple publicly acknowledged the acquisition of MapSense with its standard statement: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."