The intertubes are a flood with rumors that Apple may be building their own search engine. Does this mean they’re going into competition with Microsoft Live! Search? With Yahoo!? With Google?! (After all, Google went into competition with Apple in the smartphone market!)

Probably not, according to TechCrunch:

The answer is they’re not. But the rumors persist, and we believe they have a nugget of truth. Here’s what we think is really going on: Apple doesn’t like the search experience on its mobile devices, and may be building a radically different user experience which is much more visual than exists today. It will likely still be powered by Google results, but Apple may present it in a very different way that suits mobile users much better.

Apple’s already proven with the iPhone Map application that they can produce absolutely killer front-ends for Google’s data pipes, could they do the same for search? And what would it be like?