Newly unsealed testimony from a senior Apple executive reveals that the company seriously considered the idea of acquiring Bing in order to challenge Google in the search market. Apple even met with Microsoft to discuss the possibility, but ultimately decided against it. (via The Washington Post)
The failure of the purchase by Apple came down to several reasons, according to the testimony. It was a matter of cost and complexity. John GiannandreaJohn Giannandrea was born in the 1960s in Bridge of Allan, Scotland. Giannandrea received a Bachelor of Science with Honors in Computer Science from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland in 1988. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the same university in 2013. In addition to his role at Apple, Giannandrea is a board of trustees member at..., Apple’s senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy said that Apple would have had to invest heavily in Bing in order to make it competitive with Google, and that it would have been difficult to integrate Bing into Apple’s ecosystem of products and services.
Another factor may have been Apple’s lucrative revenue-sharing agreement with Google. Google pays Apple billions of dollars each year to be the default search engine on iPhones and other devices. It’s possible that Apple was worried about losing this revenue stream if it switched to Bing.
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Additionally, Apple has been developing its own search engine, codenamed “Pegasus”, for several years. Pegasus is already deployed in some Apple apps, such as TV and Maps, and is expected to power the App Store soon. This suggests that Apple is still interested in challenging Google in the search market, and could potentially incorporate Pegasus into a full-scale web search engine for Safari in the future.
John Giannandrea’s testimony shows that Apple thought long and hard about whether they could compete with Google by working on their own search engine. One of the other things they also did was start to intercept a small number of search queries from Safari and show users their own suggestions, instead of sending all the queries to Google.
The way I think about it is that we are getting the first bite at the apple, so to speak. We’re intercepting every query you’re trying to do and trying to decide whether we can help.
Apple SVP John GiannandreaJohn Giannandrea was born in the 1960s in Bridge of Allan, Scotland. Giannandrea received a Bachelor of Science with Honors in Computer Science from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland in 1988. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the same university in 2013. In addition to his role at Apple, Giannandrea is a board of trustees member at... testimony
Whatever the reason, Apple’s decision not to buy Bing was a victory for Google. Google maintains a dominant position in the search market, with a market share of over 90%. It’s hard to imagine what the search landscape would look like if Apple had decided to go head-to-head with Google.
