A scenario existed back in 2020 where Bing would have been in the hands of Apple, according to the latest report, with the technology giant having talks with Microsoft to acquire the search engine. Had the deal closed, Bing would have likely looked very different than it does today and probably lacked a chatbot integration.
Had Apple successfully acquired Bing, it would have replaced Google as the default search engine on all the company’s devices
Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services met with Microsoft executives to talk about a potential sale of Bing, according to Bloomberg. Currently, Google is the default search engine on all Apple devices, and if the deal with Microsoft was successful a few years ago, Bing would have been the new replacement running on all of the Cupertino firm’s devices. Unfortunately, acquiring Bing for Apple would have serious drawbacks, which is probably why the talks never progressed beyond a certain point.
Google compensates Apple financially with a lucrative sum to have its search engine running as default, and acquiring Bing would have completely eliminated that revenue stream. Additionally, Apple executives believed that Bing could not compete with Google in terms of quality and capabilities, and receiving $7 billion annually as part of the agreement between the two giants is not chump change either.
We did report about a rumor that Apple was ramping up efforts to develop a search engine to rival Google, but given the billions it receives each year, the work on the project would have been abandoned entirely as part of the agreement. While the following is not confirmed, it is possible that Apple running Bing on all of its devices would have limited users when wanting to run other search engines such as Yahoo or DuckDuckGo.
With Google’s search engine operating as default, Apple device owners have that liberty while also having the option to install Bing, which has significantly improved thanks to its battery-saving properties, extended browsing features, and integration with OpenAI’s chatbot. Unfortunately, in our experience, the search results generated are still inferior to Google’s, so this area requires immense refinements.
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