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Something rather interesting popped up during Google’s antitrust trial. It seems like Microsoft wanted Apple to buy its Bing search engine at one point. This happened back in 2020, Bloomberg reports.
Microsoft actually wanted Apple to buy Bing a couple of years ago
Do note that these talks never got too serious. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president (SVP), was involved in the talks, but he never got too interested. In other words, Apple was never too interested in replacing Google as its main search engine on iPhones.
Actually, based on the report, Microsoft believes Apple entertained the idea briefly just to get more money from Google. Microsoft’s Mikhail Parakhin said: “It is no secret that Apple is making more money on Bing existing than Bing does”.
Apple has a rather lucrative deal with Google, and it has been that way for a long time. So this is not surprising. Also, however, it seems like Apple has “had concerns about Bing’s ability to compete with Google in quality and capabilities”.
Apple is making a ton of cash by keeping Google as its default search engine
So, many of you are probably wondering how much is Apple making from its deal with Google. Well, we don’t have any concrete numbers, but based on reports, it gets upwards of $20 billion annually. That manages to keep Google Search as the default search engine on both iOS and iPadOS.
We all know that the vast majority of users will never bother with changing the default setting, or in this case, the default search engine. Also, they’re very familiar with Google, so most of them probably don’t want to.
If they ever do get a wish to do so, it’s rather simple to do, but it does require tapping through settings a bit. It’s not as convoluted as DuckDuckGo’s CEO said it is, when claiming it “takes too many steps”. People simply don’t change default settings all that often, for better or worse.
As a reminder, Google’s antitrust trial kicked off on September 12, and it will keep going for around two months.