Apple may have owned Bing in 2018, when court filings revealed that Microsoft proposed selling the search engine to the iPhone maker.
Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.
The release Friday of documents from Google’s antitrust lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice revealed some interesting things about Bing. The case raises some interesting questions about Bing, determining whether Alphabet has a monopoly on web search advertising and the legality of agreements with Google and Apple that make it the default search in Safari.
In an early February filing, Google claimed that Microsoft pitched Apple six times between 2009 and 2020 to make Bing the default search in Safari. CNBC. Apple reportedly turned them down each time, citing obvious quality issues.
“In each case, Apple thoroughly considered the relative quality of Bing and Google and concluded that Google was the superior default choice for Safari users,” Google wrote. “That’s competition.”
After spending nearly $100 million on Bing over two decades, Microsoft approached Apple with another offer in 2018, Google claims. Beyond simply using it as Safari’s default search, Microsoft has proposed the possibility of selling the engine to Apple or forming a joint venture.
In the filing, Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, evaluated Bing and said, “Microsoft’s search quality, their investment in search, everything just didn’t matter. So everything went down. The search quality itself wasn’t that good either.”
“They weren’t investing at the level that Google and Microsoft were able to invest,” Cue continued. “And their advertising organization and monetization methods weren’t very good either.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook also reportedly sent an email to Apple executives about Bing, Google added. However, his comments are redacted in the filing itself.
According to the Justice Department’s complaint, Mr. Cue testified that “if Apple had not received the huge payments it was seeking from Google, Apple would have developed its own search engine.”
During the trial, Qiu told the court that Google appeared to be Apple’s only option and that Google was offered as the default partly because Apple “always thought Google was the best option.” . Cue also said that Apple has no interest in creating its own search engine because the deal with Google is what is best for users.
The 2018 attempt wasn’t the only time Microsoft reportedly tried to sell Bing to Apple. The September lawsuit alleges that Microsoft began talks in 2020, but the talks broke down before they left the consideration stage.
