Google currently pays Apple hundreds of billions of dollars to make its search engine the default on Safari. Specifically, we know that in 2021, Google paid a whopping $26 billion to be the default search engine on Apple devices.
This has caused many problems for the company, as the United States accuses Google of having a monopoly position in its search engine. For this reason, Google has had to pay no less than 15 billion dollars for violating US antitrust laws.
Apple openly laughs at Microsoft Bing search engine
Microsoft has been ramping up its efforts to improve the positioning of its Bing search engine for some time now. It has greatly optimized it and added different features, such as the inclusion of Copilot, among other functions. It even has a points program so that you can use Edge and the Bing browser and get rewards such as Xbox controllers, Game Pass and other products.
Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of services, has stressed that there is no alternative. He has even stressed that:
I don’t think there’s any price in the world that Microsoft would offer us. They offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company.
Interestingly, Microsoft was very close to selling its search engine Bing to Apple in 2018. The agreement ended up being broken after several critical problems were detected in the quality of searches.
Years later, in 2021, Apple conducted a study to determine the quality of Google and Bing searches. The analysis showed that Google Search was significantly better than Bing. To give you an idea, out of all the points analyzed, Microsoft’s search engine only won in the desktop user interface section.
During the lawsuit against Google’s monopoly position, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stressed that Google does not play fair with Bing. He stressed that the agreement between Google and Apple negatively affected Bing’s growth and reach.
Interestingly, Microsoft has proposed to share 100% of Bing’s revenue with Apple. Apple has expressed concern about not being able to generate enough revenue. They have highlighted that Bing’s monetization and advertising are horrible.
Apple believes that Google is a great product for its customers and wants them to know that. On the other hand, abandoning the Google search engine in favor of Bing would “jeopardize its revenues,” according to Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.
As if that were not enough, Apple claims that AI will radically change searches, but it will not happen in the near future. This is a blow to Microsoft, who has focused on integrating AI into its products and Bing at all costs and in a forced manner.
Not everything is negative for Microsoft, as in April it surpassed 140 million active users. It is estimated that one of the reasons has to do with the deployment of artificial intelligence.