Apple held talks with DuckDuckGo to replace Alphabet Inc.’s Google as the default search engine for the private mode on its Safari browser but ultimately rejected the idea.
The details of talks between Apple and DuckDuckGo and those of Apple’s discussions about buying Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search engine in 2018 and 2020 were revealed in transcripts unsealed by the judge overseeing the U.S. government’s antitrust trial against Google, a report from Bloomberg said.
DuckDuckGo had about 20 meetings and phone calls with Apple executives, including the head of Safari about becoming the default search engine for private browsing, Safari does not track websites or record users’ browsing history in Private mode.
Apple also held talks with Microsoft executives in 2018 about possibly using Bing’s search engine for Safari. The companies held a series of meetings in the fall of 2018 and again around Christmas in 2020 to discuss a joint venture or possible sale of Bing to Apple, Apple executive John Giannandrea said.
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However, talks with DuckDuckGo did not lead to fruition because it relied on Bing for its search information, which Giannandrea added led him to believe that DuckDuckGo’s “marketing about privacy is somewhat incongruent with the details.”
As part of talks with Microsoft, Apple studied Bing’s search results compared with Google. The May 2021 study found that Google provided better results everywhere except for English language search information on desktop, where Bing’s results tied with Google’s, the report said.
The U.S. Justice Department alleges that Google had paid billions of dollars to Apple and others to be the default engine on web browsers and smartphones. These, it alleges, kept other search engines becoming rivals to Google.
The news of talks between Apple, DuckDuckGo and Microsoft comes days after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified about his company’s negotiations to persuade Apple to make Bing the default search engine on Safari, replacing Google. Nadella said Microsoft was willing to lose billions of dollars if Apple made the switch.
The antitrust case against Google is the biggest U.S. antitrust case against a big tech company since the same department took on Microsoft more than two decades ago over the dominance of its Windows operating system.
Published - October 05, 2023 02:12 pm IST
