Home Mobiles Samsung phones to ditch Google, switch to Bing as default search engine: Report

Samsung phones to ditch Google, switch to Bing as default search engine: Report

Samsung smartphones come with Google as the default search engine but this could change if it decides to use AI-powered Microsoft Bing instead.

By Marcia Sekhose -

Published On: April 18, 2023

Highlights

Samsung is reportedly thinking of switching its search engine to Microsoft's Bing.
Microsoft Bing is back in the limelight after years following its AI integration.
The final decision hasn't been made though and Samsung might just stick with Google.

Google is the pioneer among search engines but its dominance might be shaken soon. A report by the New York Times (via Ars Technica) says that Samsung is considering switching from Google Search to Microsoft Bing as its default search engine on smartphones. This would be a big blow to Google since Samsung is the second-biggest smartphone maker in the world.

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Microsoft revamped Bing earlier this year and integrated it with OpenAI's GPT models which also powers the very popular and trending ChatGPT. How is it better? With an AI-powered Bing, you can basically ask it more complex questions and also give tasks. This was quite a smart move considering Bing is almost non-existent in the browsing world, and it also gives the search engine an edge over rivals.

As for Samsung choosing Microsoft over Google, the decision isn't final yet. According to the report, the decision is still under negotiation and "Samsung could stick with Google." So we may not see Bing on Samsung phones after all but the possibility is still there and it would seriously change things in the smartphone world.

Also, Samsung may be contemplating but it's not going to be easy to execute. As explained by Andreas Proschofsky on Twitter, all Android OEMs have to sign MADA (Mobile Application Distribution Agreement) so that they can have Google Play Store apps including Google Search on their phones. Now removing Google Search would mean not having access to the Google app ecosystem which doesn't seem like a viable option.

Google pays Samsung, Apple to be default search engine

Google is known to pay a hefty amount to both Samsung and Apple to stay as the default search engine. The tech giant reportedly pays Apple $20 billion per year, and Samsung $3.5 billion per year for the same. Having said so, there's no word from Microsoft on this matter and also whether the company would be willing to shell out this much money as Google does.

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Microsoft is currently busy updating Bing with more features and also to OpenAI's latest GPT-4 model. People who have access to Bing's preview version can access the updated search engine. Microsoft also integrated OpenAI's DALL-E image creator with Bing. Through this feature users can directly generate images from Bing Chat. It's called the "Bing Image Creator" and you can ask it to generate images based on the details provided.

Google was also quick to start its own AI work, and plans to integrate AI chat to search. An AI-powered search engine on smartphones would be something very interesting but with no official confirmation yet, it's hard to say if we'll indeed see one soon.

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