Google Says Microsoft Offered To Sell Bing To Apple in 2018, But Search-quality Issues Got in the Way (cnbc.com) 21
Microsoft offered to sell its Bing search engine to Apple in 2018, Google said in a court filing earlier this month. The document, from Google's antitrust case against the U.S. Justice Department, was unsealed on Friday. From a report: In the filing earlier this month, Google argued that Microsoft pitched Apple in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020 about making Bing the default in Apple's Safari web browser, but each time, Apple said no, citing quality issues with Bing. "In each instance, Apple took a hard look at the relative quality of Bing versus Google and concluded that Google was the superior default choice for its Safari users. That is competition," Google wrote in the filing.
The Justice Department said in its own newly unsealed filing that Microsoft has spent almost $100 billion on Bing over 20 years. The Windows and Office software maker launched Bing in 2009, following search efforts under the MSN and Windows Live brands. Today Bing has 3% global market share, according to StatCounter. In the fourth quarter, Microsoft generated $3.2 billion from search and news advertising, while Google search and other revenue totaled $48 billion. Google said in its filing that when Microsoft reached out to Apple in 2018, emphasizing gains in Bing's quality, Microsoft offered to either sell Bing to Apple or establish a Bing-related joint venture with the company.
The Justice Department said in its own newly unsealed filing that Microsoft has spent almost $100 billion on Bing over 20 years. The Windows and Office software maker launched Bing in 2009, following search efforts under the MSN and Windows Live brands. Today Bing has 3% global market share, according to StatCounter. In the fourth quarter, Microsoft generated $3.2 billion from search and news advertising, while Google search and other revenue totaled $48 billion. Google said in its filing that when Microsoft reached out to Apple in 2018, emphasizing gains in Bing's quality, Microsoft offered to either sell Bing to Apple or establish a Bing-related joint venture with the company.
Can't disagree (Score:5, Informative)
So maybe I'm holding it wrong, but every time I use bing I seem to get results that just don't match what I'm looking for, as well as google.
Take the search "confluence java jsoup".
For me, google result first page is the Atlassian (who makes Confluence) Java documentation on jsoup. Just where I want to start things. Bing? Produces stakoverflow pages that are relevant to Confluence, but appear not to have jsoup, a Baeldung page on jsoup with no Confluence relevance, the jsoup docs (not Confluence relevant), then finally a link to one of the jsoup classes in the Atlassian documentation, not the package summary (yes a run on sentence, but mimics what looking through bing felt like).
Just do not feel like bing is doing as good as google, though maybe I found some extreme example.
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Re:Can't disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
That's bizarre.
My experience with DDG is that search results are 99% identical to Bing for at least the first couple pages. VERY RARELY I'll see a variance on the second or third result. I would have put money that DDG functionally mirrors Bing results.
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To the best of my knowledge, DuckDuckGo actually uses Bing (anonymised) to perform its searches. This behaviour is documented.
Re:Can't disagree (Score:4, Informative)
"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google."
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You were searching for porn weren't you. Bing is good for all the weird fetishes.
Re:Can't disagree (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft has always struggled to get search right. Try searching for a file on your hard drive that you KNOW is there, and often it won't find the file, even if you literally use part of the file name in your search. If you're searching MSDN, you'll always get better results if you search it with Google, than with MSDN's own search. Outlook search is equally bad. I don't know why Microsoft struggles so much with search.
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So maybe I'm holding it wrong, but every time I use bing I seem to get results that just don't match what I'm looking for, as well as google. Take the search "confluence java jsoup".
If you're looking for documentation, does the (autocomplete-suggested) search term "confluence java jsoup documentation" provide the desired results on the first page?
It might be that Microsoft reckons people primarily search for comments about using the thing, and Google reckons people primarily search for official documentation of the thing? In Microsoft's Visual Studio, say you're coding in C# and got a compiler error and press F1 (help) to learn about it, they changed the behavior about 10 years ago. It
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So maybe I'm holding it wrong, but every time I use bing I seem to get results that just don't match what I'm looking for, as well as google. Take the search "confluence java jsoup".
If you're looking for documentation, does the (autocomplete-suggested) search term "confluence java jsoup documentation" provide the desired results on the first page?
It might be that Microsoft reckons people primarily search for comments about using the thing, and Google reckons people primarily search for official documentation of the thing? In Microsoft's Visual Studio, say you're coding in C# and got a compiler error and press F1 (help) to learn about it, they changed the behavior about 10 years ago. It used to take you to the official documentation for that error code which was typically dry and useless. They changed it to a bing-powered search for user comments, particularly stackoverflow. That came from UX research which showed that this ended up getting users unblocked quicker to fix their compiler error.
That makes sense, and I could accept that, if it was not for bing's first three resposnes being relevant to confluence or jsoup, but not both (though I'm a little suspicious about the tags on the stackoverflow responses...).
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I also agree (Score:1)
So maybe I'm holding it wrong, but every time I use bing I seem to get results that just don't match what I'm looking for, as well as google.
I have my phone set to use Bing by default, just to help lower the use of Google in the world a tiny bit...
It works OK for some things. It's fine looking for recipes, for example. Actually I think Bing image search may even be superior.
But since I code for a living, those are most of my searches, and as you say pretty much all the time Bing seems to fall short there.
I don't understand how this is news. (Score:2)
How can this possibly matter?
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I don't understand how this is news. This is about a 6 year old deal that never happened for a product that no one likes between companies that no one trusts.
How can this possibly matter?
It is news - the story is that there is an antitrust case against Google (presumably their search engine), and Google's argument is that MS product is simply inferior, not that they somehow use their dominant position to have their engine default on many platforms. It's interesting.
Another newsworthy information is that MS spent $100bln on bing over 20 years - it's about 10 LHCs, 1 ISS - to me the cost indicates serious "promotion" efforts, as I cannot imaging this amount spent on software engineers.
That is competition ... (Score:2)
That is competition," Google wrote in the filing.
It's easy to outcompete everybody else when you have a global monopoly (also sometimes known as a 92% global market share) on web searches and enough money to either make anybody who looks like they may become a threat an offer they can't refuse or just squash them under foot if they are disinclined to accept your offer. There is a big difference between healthy constructive competition and what Google does.
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Google and Chrome are enough better than Edge/Bing, that people go out of their way to make the switch when they get new Windows machines. And this is on top of Microsoft having mechanisms in Edge that detect the downloading of Chrome and discourage it.
One of the most amusing sideshows of the past 5 years has been watching the little page-rendering / browser popup tip war between G and MSFT (and Firefox to a lesser extent). There was one point when it was very clear that MSFT devs had added a first-run popup announcing a new Edge feature, in the exact location and size to specifically cover the part of the Google.com homepage that detected your browser and would suggest you download Chrome.
It's Network Effect Turtles all the way down (Score:1)
Google could scan more sites because they sold more ads because they were already bigger which allowed them to scan more sites and have more ads to get more revenue to scan more sites etc etc etc.
2024 : Quality issues BING still not solved (Score:2)
Adding this as a note for future reference.