Apple Considered Buying Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine

Apple discussed acquiring Microsoft’s Bing search engine in 2020 and using it to replace Google as the iPhone’s default search tool.

The companies had high-level talks brokered by Apple’s senior vice president of services Eddy Cue, Bloomberg reports, but never came to fruition. 

The ramifications of the scraped Bing talks remain clearly evident today. Microsoft’s 14-year-old search engine remains a distant also-ran behind Google, which has a 90% market share.

Yet Apple's decision to stick with Google is something of a double-edged sword for the tech giants. It has been lucrative for Apple—Google pays billions of dollars each year to remain the default option—but now both companies are caught up in a sweeping antitrust case against Google, and the Justice Department has pointed to the Apple-Google deal as evidence of Google’s allegedly monopolistic over search. 

Apple’s Cue testified earlier this week in the case, defending his company’s decision to stick with Google when the two businesses renegotiated their deal in 2016: “Certainly there wasn’t a valid alternative to Google at the time.”