Google Is Spared a Search-Engine Switch by a Major Partner

Samsung Electronics won't be swapping out the default search engine on its smartphones from Google to Microsoft's Bing any time soon, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Samsung, the world's largest smartphone maker, has suspended an internal review that had explored replacing Google with Bing on its mobile devices, the people said. The potential switch would have swapped out Google as the go-to search engine on Samsung's "Internet" web-browsing app, which comes preinstalled on the South Korean company's smartphones. Any imminent breakup would have handed Bing a coveted victory in a search-engine space that has long been dominated by Alphabet-owned Google. This year, Bing gained some fresh momentum as it adopted the features of ChatGPT, the chatbot that has surged in popularity and is run by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

Just one point

[jonbryce]

Bing is the default search engine on Windows. Lots of people use Windows, but they all change the default to Google and use Edge as a Google Chrome downloading tool.

Re:

[jonadab]

Right, what's going on here is, Samsung wants their devices to be usable out of the box. They don't want users to have to fight bad setup for the first several months that they have the device until they finally figure out how to fix it so it works right, only to have all that work lost the next time they upgrade. That's a bad user experience, and it can cause you to hemmorage customers as you lose repeat business when people talk to their friends about how *their* experience was with a different manufact

Re: Just one point

[sixminuteabs]

This is about as persuasive and believable as all the âoeI switched muh grandmama to Mint Linux and she has never been happier âoe line that gets replied to every microsoft story that is not about Bing

Re:

[jonadab]

Windows, whatever else we can say about it (and yes, I do have some criticisms, but this is not the thread for them), is a widely-used product. *Most* of the 8 billion people on the planet, have used it at some point. Bing, not so much.

Expected Move?

[willkane]

They banned ChatGPT usage within the company and Bing is more and more being integrated with ChatGPT. Switching to Bing would have been looked contradictory.

Re:

[Luckyo]

These two are utterly unrelated. The reason for ChatGPT ban within the company is fear of leaks of intellectual property to a competitor. Usage of a default search engine in company browser aimed at consumer market is aimed at:

1. Completely different people.
2. Solving completely different problem.

Re:

[david.emery]

Since I don't have any moderator points, let me just say "What he said! ^^^^"

(But on the Windows 11 box I got for a couple projects that are hard to do on my Macs, it's really hard to avoid Bing, since all the Microsoft built-in services use that despite what the 'search engine preference' says.)

Re:

[smooth wombat]

(But on the Windows 11 box I got for a couple projects that are hard to do on my Macs, it's really hard to avoid Bing, since all the Microsoft built-in services use that despite what the 'search engine preference' says.)

What? You go to DuckDuckGo and use that. Stop being lazy and using the url bar to "search". Go to the site and do your work.

This is as bad as people saying they always use search in Windows, then complain when things do go right. Fuck search. Go to the software entry and select i

Re:

[david.emery]

I have very little WIndows experience, particularly past Windows 7. Mostly I use the stupid Windows search bar to find system settings. For anything on the internet, I use Firefox with DuckDuckGo.

Re: It is about the money

[Mr. Underbridge]

I think OP means embedded links and other services that spawn a browser tab, and that make a clean hyperlink hard to acquire. Also, if you want to avoid MS search results, duckduckgo is just about the last browser I'd use given their ties to MS, and how they preferentially return MSN-wrapped search results that force app download to even view.

No one uses the Samsung browser

[brunes69]

Most people don't even know the Samsung browser exists. Why they continue to even invest in it is beyond me.

This was much ado about nothing.