According to BusinessWeek, Apple and Microsoft may be in talks to defenestrate Google as the iPhone’s default search engine, in favour of Bing. This Apple-Google battle for the mobile throne is getting heated.
This is all coming from “two people familiar with the matter”, so, you know, eat a bowl of salt or whatever, but it sort of makes sense in a Machiavellian kind of way. Windows Mobile 7 notwithstanding, Apple’s competition in the mobile arena isn’t Microsoft, but Google, and so it’s not really that outlandish, especially considering that Bing isn’t necessarily a worse search engine than Google. Apple avoids throwing unnecessary support to Google (although the iPhone will still feature Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail) while Microsoft gains a huge market for Bing. Everybody wins, except Google, who only mostly wins.
What do you guys think? If Bing was the default search engine on your phone, would you go through the necessary steps to change it to Google? I have a feeling a lot of people might just not care. [BusinessWeek]
Sachee Perera
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 9:20 PMBing is retarded for your everyday search needs. Only thing i like about Bing is its image search which is better than Google’s.
i will like to keep Google as my search provider thanks!
Travis New
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 9:52 PMI use Bing as my default search engine on Chrome. I like the aesthetics of chrome and it’s speed but prefer Bing for my searches.
dan
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 10:24 PMthat is the worst news i could ever hear, how about giving users the choice of it… i hate Microsoft and anything that comes from them, and it will be a big shame on apple if they did that switch, bing is not even that good… terrible news!
matt
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 11:09 AMI agree! I hate Apple and everything that comes from them, it saddens me to here that stupid Apple products will be clogging up the bandwidth of Bing – the most awesome thing ever – slowing down my searches on how to be more of a tool. Microsoft shouldn’t be this charitible to the likes of Apple!
Jason
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 10:27 PMBing “isn’t necessarily a worse search engine” engine than Google? Are you nuts? Tried using it myself after it was first released. It’s about half as good if that. I kept having to go back to Google to find what I wanted. It’s an improvement from the old version sure, but its pretty awful when all is said and done. Hope this isn’t true.
Maddogeco
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 10:31 PMI real want bing on iPhone I have bing mac as the default search engine. Bring it on
Andrew Swan
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 11:26 PMYeah, I would change it (though didn’t know you could change the search engine in Safari!). Tried Bing, don’t like it. Google will always be my search engine.
Steve
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 12:47 AMI’ve only bothered using Bing a few times – Google is such a force of habit these days – but I’ve found its image searching to be hugely superior to Google’s. I think if the default was switched for me, I’d at least give it a few weeks’ trial.
Jason Ranieri
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 3:16 AMmeh google app still works ….
Simon Potts
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 9:50 AMIve used Bing once just to check it out and hated the results. Totally irrelevant. Same query in Google got the result I wanted straight away.
However I have a better idea. Apple how about you let US the USERS select who will be our search providers in Safari and on the iPhone??
Even Microsoft lets you do that in IE!!!
It annoys me no end that in safari on my mac that it defaults to Google.com not google.com.au
There is a hack to change it, but you shouldn’t need a hack.