During last year’s Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, where the government tried to prove that the
search engine
giant used licensing deals and other contracts to lock out rivals to monopolise the market, an
Apple
executive said that the company considered buying
Bing
– Microsoft’s search engine but the deal didn’t get through.
has now provided a different angle saying that
Microsoft
wanted to sell Bing to Apple but it rejected the offer.
According to a court filing earlier this month, which was unsealed on Friday (February 23), Google said that Microsoft offered to sell its Bing search engine to Apple in 2018.
Google also 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, as per a report by CNBC.
Why this is important
The revelation comes as several companies, including Microsoft, alleged that Google has a monopoly in the search business as it cut deals with the companies to make Google Search as default search engine on their devices. Google is trying to prove that it competes fairly in the search business.
During the hearing in October last year, it was revealed that in 2021, Google spent more than $26 billion to keep its search engine the default on iPhones. Google also said that Microsoft reached out to Apple in 2018, pitching gains in Bing’s quality, and offered to either sell Bing to Apple or establish a Bing-related joint venture with the company.
What Apple said
Google also noted that Apple rejected Microsoft’s offer citing under-par search quality.
“Microsoft search quality, their investment in search, everything was not significant at all,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, according to the filing.
“And so everything was lower. So the search quality itself wasn’t as good. They weren’t investing at any level comparable to Google or to what Microsoft could invest in. And their advertising organisation and how they monetise was not very good either,” Cue said.
Meanwhile, Apple’s head of machine learning John Giannandrea, who worked on Search at Google, said that if Apple “entered into a joint venture with Bing, it would have implications for the Google relationship.” Giannandrea also said he believed Apple CEO Tim Cook told Microsoft the deal wasn’t going forward.
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