A year ago, the Department of Justice (DOJ) intended to sue Google over its agreements to make its search engine the default in most browsers and on US smartphones. Microsoft’s CEO testified in that trial, and he said something surprising about Bing, Google, and Apple.
During the trial, Satya Nadella spoke about how Microsoft’s search engine Bing has struggled to compete against Google. He told the court that Google gets a big advantage by being the top search option that everyone sees first. Because of this, not many people use Bing or even try changing their settings to Bing.
Nadella said this makes it really hard for Bing to grow and improve. Since fewer people search on Bing, it doesn’t get as much data on what people want to find. This data helps Google keep making its search engine better all the time. Without this data, Bing can’t keep up no matter how much work Microsoft does.
The DOJ thinks it’s unfair that Google pays companies lots of money to make sure its search is number one. Nadella agrees with this. He even said Microsoft would be okay losing over $15 billion each year if Apple chose Bing instead of Google as the default on iPhones and iPads. Microsoft believes this would allow more people to see how good Bing can be.
While Bing hasn’t beaten Google in searches yet, Microsoft has succeeded in making artificial intelligence. Their new chatbots are very smart too! But Bing still has a long road to drive more traffic away from Google Search. Only time will tell if people will widely switch to searching with Bing.
