Bye bye, Bing
Google becomes Apple’s search engine of choice in the latest change to Siri
Aple has made a subtle yet important change to the way that Siri and Search on iOS and Spotlight on mac OS return web search results. From now on the top hits will always come from the new default, Google – not Microsoft’s Bing search engine as was previously the case.
Apple says this is to maintain consistency with the default search engine in Safari on both platforms, but the reason is likely to be more prosaic than that: it’s estimated by analysts that Apple will be paid $3 billion by Google this year to be the default search engine on both iOS and Mac – a deal that goes back at least a decade.
In practice, web search results including links and videos will return results from Google, with the company’s YouTube video sharing web site being, somewhat controversially, prioritized over the more generic Google video search. However, Bing still appears to be the default when searching for images on the web in most cases – at least for now.
You can, of course change the default search engine in Safari on both platforms if you want, with DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo remaining as options. However, changing the default search engine this way does not alter the results that Siri and Search in iOS and Spotlight in mac OS return – you still end up with links supplied by Google whichever option you choose.