Samsung is giving up on the concept after a few weeks, like the majority of users who attempt to move to Bing. The New York Times previously reported that Samsung was thinking of replacing Google Search on its Android phones with the ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine. A month later, a fresh article from The Wall Street Journal claims that Samsung “won’t be switching the default search engine on its smartphones from Google to Microsoft’s Bing any time soon,” despite the fact that it “isn’t definitively slamming the door on Bing as a future option.”
Samsung and Google were negotiating to renew their search engine contract when a rumour about Samsung switching to Bing surfaced. The report may have simply been a negotiating gimmick. Usually kept private, Google pays Apple and Samsung large sums of money to make Google Search the default on their smartphones. For years, jokes have been made about Microsoft’s Bing, but its recent inclusion of the trendy ChatGPT generative AI has changed that. The prior NYT article described Google’s “horror” and “panic” when Samsung suggested using Bing instead of Google. It’s likely that Samsung obtained better contract conditions.
Every few years, Samsung and Google appear to perform this dance. Samsung tries to create alternative Android apps like the Galaxy App Store so that it is less dependent on Google. Yet whenever the business takes this seriously, Google spends money to get them to stop.