Video: Apple will Have a Powerful Search Engine for the "AppWorld," John Battelle

LOS ANGELES -- Despite the explicit denial by Apple CEO Steve Jobs on plans to build a search engine, the company is doing exactly that, says John Battelle.

On Tuesday night, during his on-stage dialogue with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, Jobs talked about the explosion of iPhone and iPad apps, which have passed 200,000 and are growing by 20,000 per week.

He painted a picture of fast evolving Internet where Web browsing, particularly on mobile devices is becoming mostly App-focused, not Web focused.

He denied Apple is building a search engine.

Yesterday, I spoke with John Battelle, co-founder of Wired, author of the seminal book on Google and CEO of Federated Media.

He says that Apple's new search engine will not compete with Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo! in indexing Web pages, but it will index Apps. Actually, this won't be a search engine with queries and results, it will be an automated system to serve personalized results.

He says that Apple's acquisition of "Google killer" Cuil is enabling this new effort.

Yesterday in his Searchblog, he wrote "Of Course Apple is Going to Do Search"

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