have been knocking the idea of Apple waiting in the wings for months now. Things got interesting when they recently bought Topsy.

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A lot of people are focused on the social media analytics piece of Topsy, but Azeem Azhar, founder of PeerIndex, a social analytics company says, "Topsy is a search engine, at its heart."

If you want to find old tweets, Topsy is the best way to do it.

Apple's search capabilities are also pretty crappy. Have you tried searching in Apple Maps? Or the App Store? Or even on the iPhone's Spotlight search? What about Siri? Just lousy, inconsistent results.

Azhar believes Apple is going to use Topsy as the base layer for its own search engine: "Wouldn't it be smart for Apple to deploy Topsy's search infrastructure as the search layer for iOS?"

He suggests Apple would create a rival to Google's search engine, which sounds a bit too ambitious to us for Apple. We don't think Apple needs to build a Google-like search engine.

However, it does need to improve its search across the board, and Topsy's indexing, which is said to be excellent will probably be useful."