In what can be seen as a blow for Bing’s market share, Apple is changing the default search provider for Siri and Spotlight queries from Bing to Google (via Tech Crunch) The company explained that a primary reason for the change is “consistency,” since Safari on both MacOS and iOS have used Google search as the default search engine over the past few years.
Due to this this change, the Apple digital assistant no longer takes users to Bing, and will now direct users to Google for web searches, or whenever the need to show web results arises. Users across the world who usually prompt Siri to “search the web for…” will immediately notice this change, as we did on our iPhone 7 plus running iOS 10.
In a statement about this change, Apple detailed the strong relationships it has with both Google and Microsoft.
“Switching to Google as the web search provider for Siri, Search within iOS and Spotlight on Mac will allow these services to have a consistent web search experience with the default in Safari… We have strong relationships with Google and Microsoft and remain committed to delivering the best user experience possible.”
On the bright side of things, Apple’s Siri is still using Bing for web image results, so Bing is not gone entirely from Apple’s ecosystem. This is still a major change, which may please iOS users who have been using the old “Search Google for” trick when summoning Siri for web searches on Google. It’s also obviously linked to the money, since Google has already been paying Apple a boat load of money to stay as the default search on the iPhone.
