Apple considered replacing Google with privacy-focussed DuckDuckGo as the default search engine for the private mode on its Safari browser but eventually rejected the idea, news agency Bloomberg reported on Thursday. DuckDuckGo, unlike Google, does not track websites that a user visits, or stores a history of what websites a user has accessed. The details of those talks were revealed via transcripts unsealed by US District Judge Amit Mehta, who is overseeing the US government’s antitrust trial of the Alphabet unit.
This comes days after a report by Bloomberg said that it considered purchasing Microsoft’s Bing. Apple senior vice president John Giannandrea’s newly unsealed testimony throws more light on the talks. Apple met with Microsoft in 2018, and later in 2020 to discuss a potential Bing acquisition or joint venture, Bloomberg reports. The company even studied the quality of Bing’s search results compared with Google, but found Bing generally performed worse except for desktop searches in English.
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According to a report by news agency Reuters, DuckDuckGo’s CEO Gabriel Weinberg, testified on September 21 on the effect on DuckDuckGo of Google’s $10 billion in annual payments to smartphone manufacturers and others to keep its search engine as the default on computers or mobile devices. The executive added that the iPhone maker seemed “really interested” in 2016. Representatives from both the companies had meetings in 2017 and 2018 to discuss the shift to DuckDuckGo as the default in privacy mode. DuckDuckGo has about 2.5 per cent share of the search market, he testified.
Privacy-focussed DuckDuckGo had signed a deal with Apple back in 2014 to be shown as an option on Apple devices, as per a recently redacted transcript unsealed. Soon after, the search engine began pressing Apple to be made the default choice for users who wanted to work in privacy mode, which limited data collected on the user.
A recent report said that Microsoft reportedly discussed a possible sale of Bing search engine to Apple in a meeting in 2020. The agreement would have made Bing the default search engine on Apple iPhone models, therefore, replacing Google, a Bloomberg report said, citing people familiar with the matter. Apple’s top brass did not go ahead with a deal because of the money that it earns from Google. It was also concerned that Microsoft Bing may not be able to compete with Google in terms of “quality and capabilities”, the report added. The talks between Apple and Microsoft were “exploratory” and never reached an advanced stage.
