Poor Bing. Microsoft's underdog search engine used to have a quiet home on iOS and Spotlight for the Mac, but Apple today said in a statement to TechCrunch that it's parting ways with Bing for most search services.
Basically, this means that when Siri gives you a list of search results rather than answering your question directly, it'll be creating the list with Google rather than Bing.
“Switching to Google as the web search provider for Siri, Search within iOS and Spotlight on Mac will allow these services to have a consistent web search experience with the default in Safari,” Apple's statement said, emphasizing the appeal of uniformity.
But Apple isn't embracing Google in its entirety. Bing will still be the default engine for image searches for both Siri and Spotlight, possibly because Bing's searches aren't as curated as Google's (which, among other things, makes it a big hit with the porn community).
No going back
Video searches, rather pragmatically, will default to YouTube searches. Keep in mind that's still technically a win for Google.
And if you don't like Google and want to change it back? Too bad. iOS won't let you change the default engine for Siri, although you can work around it and flat-out ask Siri to search for something on Bing.
Apple didn't give any reasons for the switch apart from the desire for consistency, but it's possible money was involved.
As CNBC first reported, the Bernstein research firm made a splash in August when it suggested Google could be paying Apple as much as $3 billion a year to remain the default search engine on Safari for iPhones and iPads.
In that context, maybe Google's just trying to get a little more bang for its seemingly bottomless bucks.
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