The American Bloomberg Agency reported that Microsoft Discussed Selling Bing to Apple as Google Replacement. Bing would have replaced Google as the default search engine on Apple devices if the deal was completed.

Bloomberg reported that Microsoft executives had met with Apple Services President Eddie Kuo to negotiate a potential deal, but the talks were “only exploratory” and did not yield any progress.

According to the Bloomberg report, Apple did not proceed with the deal because of the money it earns from Google in exchange for it remaining the default search engine on its devices, and because Apple was concerned about Bing’s inability to compete with Google in “quality and capabilities.”

It is worth noting that the Google search engine has been the default search engine in various Apple devices for many years following an agreement between both companies.

Apple receives huge sums of money from Google in return, and some reports have estimated it at about $20 billion annually that Google pays to Apple.

The agreement between Apple and Google is currently under scrutiny due to an antitrust case between Google and the US Department of Justice, as the Department of Justice takes Google’s dominance over Apple devices as evidence of monopolistic practices in the search engine market.

Apple defended the presence of the Google search engine by default in its devices by saying that it had not found a “viable alternative to it.”

Apple device users can always change the default search engine to other engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.

The Bing search engine has received a lot of attention during the recent period, due to Microsoft’s cooperation with OpenAI, and adding many artificial intelligence features to it.