from Hacker News

Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

by carlycue on 4/17/23, 1:09 PM with 730 comments

by ksec on 4/17/23, 1:29 PM
This is basically Samsung asking Google to pay up. Google needs to pay Apple / iOS for Default Search Engine, and paying Samsung for staying on Android with Google Search.
Basically Google is being squeezed left and right. So the only way to increase revenue or profits to satisfy the money they spend on Apple and Samsung? More Ads on Youtube and Google Search. The more Ads they serve, the worse UX they have. All while completely fail to compete against AWS or Azure.
by simula67 on 4/17/23, 1:26 PM
I always thought that Google made a big blunder by not encroaching upon Microsoft's turf more aggressively. They should have tried to make a better desktop OS (just buy Canonical or something) and then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop. Wait for an opportunity to emerge and then pounce.
This is precisely what Microsoft did to Google. They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money. Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply.
One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop. Now, with deals such as this, Microsoft will have more data to tune their engine while Google is left on the sidelines.
Let's just hope that the AI driven search revolution does not produce a monopoly.
by chankstein38 on 4/17/23, 2:28 PM
Maybe an unpopular opinion but it feels like Google is near useless anymore. Between results containing outdated or broken links to empty discussions, and ads being their main priority as well as "fuzzy search results" where you can search for one thing and get something completely unrelated because Google decided you also meant to search for something else that is possibly contextually adjacent, I can't really get good results from it anymore.
I mean, I can still get answers for simple questions but when it comes to anything unique or complex I usually just get frustrated and go to duckduckgo or something else. ChatGPT now adays mostly.
Sure ChatGPT can hallucinate but Google's results rely on some random person somewhere to have properly answered something. The reality of that is so many of the "answers" I find are discussions on forums between a bunch of random people who have no real credentials or factual answers but instead just opinions based on something else they read on Google. People google something, read the google blurb about it at the top of the results, then go answer other people's questions.
I honestly think Google is losing favor at this point. I've even been considering moving away from Android because the OS just feels like the Walmart iOS now adays. It features the same problems but in a way that nothing is polished versus iOS.
Google needs to stop just following everyone else. Everything now adays feels like the ol Google+ move. "Ah, successful product someone else made, let's remake it and name it google something!"
by tapoxi on 4/17/23, 1:17 PM
What's Sundar's goal for Google? They seem to be aimless since he took the helm.
by roenxi on 4/17/23, 1:20 PM
1) "It will reportedly be known as Project ‘Magi’ and is said to provide a far more personalized experience than the company’s current service."
That is super creepy. Google knows a lot about you, and now it is using that knowledge to really put you in a filter bubble. Imagine this plus engagement metrics.
2) So much for that monopoly a lot of people thought Google had. Turns out they're still as exposed to market pressure as they ever were.
by AlexandrB on 4/17/23, 1:59 PM
Microsoft is a shark and they smell blood in the water right now. While I hate their products, I have to admire their decision making. For example, I think they see the threat that SteamDeck poses (Linux gaming becoming feasible) and are already working to head it off at the pass: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/handheld-mode-for-wi...
by pelagicAustral on 4/17/23, 1:23 PM
I've been using Bing for a few weeks now it is not all the way there yet but so far the experience is more gratifying than Google. The results seem to be better and there is less ads on top the search results. Their AI integration is also well accomplished. No complains there...
by Rels on 4/17/23, 1:39 PM
A lot of words without a lot of source or data.
The only source linked in the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/technology/google-search-...
It's probably the only source at all, as every number in the sammobile article is also in the NYT, like the 160+ people working on Magi.
As the sammobile article doesn't appear to do anything but regurgitate what is in the NYT article without any apparent validation on their side, the link should be changed to the NYT IMO, whose article seems at least based on actual internal messages from Google. I understand that the title isn't as attention grabbing though ("Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals").
by NayamAmarshe on 4/17/23, 6:00 PM
I don't know how Bing is any better. I tried Bing today and the results are awful! The search results page is very bloated and there's too much going on everywhere. Too much irrelevant information. What surprises me is that they managed to make content look like ads, irrelevant and noisy.
Comparing the screens to Brave Search, I'm surprised how good Brave Search is. Not only are the results much better, but the UI is super-clean! There's only digestible information and no bloat.
by Animats on 4/17/23, 6:35 PM
This may be a Myspace moment for Google. The competition is now better.
There's another huge issue. Google is an ad business. That meshes well with search, and not so well with question answering system on mobile. What's ChatGPT supposed to say? "But first, this word from our sponsor?".
A big change in the ecosystem is coming. These next generation systems are being set up as walled gardens. Bing FAQ: "You’ll need to use the Microsoft Edge browser and sign in with your Microsoft account to access all the capabilities of the new Bing." Google is talking about limiting the number of users of their chat system, which implies they are tying usage to login.
This is a huge change to the business model. It's going to be about owning the customer relationship, not serving ads.
by bfrog on 4/17/23, 2:04 PM
Too busy asking people to invert binary trees and not looking for people that know how to make products that make money.
by jimmar on 4/17/23, 1:25 PM
This sounds similar to Walmart saying they'll stop taking Visa. Samsung would be dumb not to at least threaten moving away from Google, even if they had no intention to change. It's a negotiating tactic, one that has more teeth in recent months because Google's competitors are finally showing a real challenge.
by tomcam on 4/17/23, 8:55 PM
A gentle reminder that there is no proof of the “Google in shock“ assertion. The fact that an anonymous source maybe claimed it to someone at the New York Times has essentially zero credibility.
Until an attributed source at Google says something like “we were shocked“ or “we were gobsmacked, etc.“ that’s all just third-hand information reported fourth-hand.
by dougmwne on 4/17/23, 1:36 PM
From my use of Bard, I think it’s main issue is poor alignment due to lack of RLHF dataset. Open AI has been curating its data set for years as it aggressively pushed to productization. Google never cared about getting its models into the hands of the public so is having to scramble. I think Google will catch up eventually, but not before doing major damage to its market share and partnerships.
by eoooooooo on 4/17/23, 1:23 PM
Some interesting dynamics at play here if true. Google basically maintains Android to get people to use Google services on it, so Samsung switching to Bing would eliminate Google's incentive to develop Android. Samsung is also by FAR the largest Android OEM and holds almost as much power over the platform as Google just from the sheer amount of Android devices that they ship.
by ocdtrekkie on 4/17/23, 1:20 PM
Samsung has done this before, and Google has multiple times made various offers and incentives intended to "encourage" Samsung not to. Because a huge portion of the Android monopoly will leave Google Search when this happens. Stuff like OEMs getting a cut of Play Store revenue are mechanics done to avoid this.
There's a pretty good chance Samsung is just negotiating for better terms, kinda like carriage disputes for TV networks.
by freediver on 4/17/23, 2:15 PM
Now we have Kagi and Magi, lovely.
Btw Magi was already a search engine - magi.com and it seems it is suspending services now, wonder if domain is being bought by Google?
by nstart on 4/17/23, 4:44 PM
A quick note to say that this article is mostly a rehash of the New York Times article it references as its source. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/technology/google-search-...
by hardware2win on 4/17/23, 1:31 PM
If Bing will manage to pull it off then the only conclusion to draw from this will be: never bet against Microsoft, lol.
by qwertox on 4/17/23, 3:08 PM
Up until ChatGPT, Bing was meaningless to me; Google Search served all my needs. I never had a reason to look over to Bing. The only contact I had with it was when something embedded their maps.
But now, with the AI integration, even when I tried it and left disappointed, Bing is starting to sound interesting.
Then there's how they are starting to integrate AI into their other products and putting a lot of good effort in visual design. Their products look modern and polished, while Google is "still the same old" with their Material Design.
I know they are the most capable engineers and that behind the scenes they are building the best quality soft- and hardware, but if they don't start to focus on the user again they will no longer be the titan they used to be.
by arthurofbabylon on 4/17/23, 2:18 PM
As an advertiser, it occurs to me that google severely dropped the ball. I've been waiting to hand them money, but they refuse to be sufficiently organized to onboard new, non-megacorp advertisers.
At first glance that makes sense: prioritize onboarding large businesses with large budgets. With a second thought, this approach seems foolish: their ad network is an ecosystem, and the X00,000 businesses like mine that are excluded would be an enormous boost to ad bids, ad targeting, and ad quality – 3 of the 4 things that Google breathes (the fourth being traffic).
If google screwed this up, what else are they screwing up?
by newbie578 on 4/17/23, 3:51 PM
Love to see a title like this. Would love to be a fly inside the Google execs offices right now. I do wonder if they are confused, why are their factory workers, i.e. leet code solvers not able to innovate?
I find this hilarious and positively validating. Building a tech product is not about being able to memorise an algorithm or knowing how to sort an array in the fastest way possible. They are stuck in the past.
You will not ask a today's Software Engineer how does a bootloader function, yet the big tech companies keep asking irrelevant questions blown by time and progress.
by ur-whale on 4/17/23, 3:13 PM
The problem with Google is very simple: they have become entirely incapable of creating new products (specifically: stuff that people actually want).
Most of the tech. that underpins OpenAI's stuff has been invented at Google, and quite a long time ago.
They've been sitting on it, not doing anything with it, and even when their most direct competitor comes to take a huge pound of flesh out using stuff they created, all they manage to do is put out a lame subpar competitor (bard).
Things this situation evokes for me:
```
   - Google plus

   - Kodak

   - Xerox
```
by devmor on 4/17/23, 2:17 PM
Both major search engines are utterly useless when compared to the Google of years ago, but anecdotally I do find Bing more reliable lately for actually finding what I'm looking for.
by shever73 on 4/17/23, 1:29 PM
This is hardly surprising. I never normally use Google, but was asked to check some SEO using Google search the other day. The results were a dumpster fire of sponsored content, “other people also search for” and stuff that was largely irrelevant. I had to go onto the second and third pages to find anything even remotely close to what I wanted.
by rvba on 4/17/23, 3:27 PM
> Google Magi’s initial launch will be only in the US, with a maximum of one million users. Later, by the year’s end, it will expand to 30 million users.
It seems they never learned from the failed launches like Google Wave or Google Plus. Where you couldnt use them and by the time you and your friends got them the hype allready wore off.
by dathinab on 4/17/23, 1:45 PM
Soon we have a Microsoft more power full then ever but less controlled and constrained by anti monopoly regulation then ever.
- after google search degraded for a while bing is competive
- MS has much influence and stack in (not really open) OpenAI
- MS has with LinkedLn a relevant social network, sure it's work focused but increasingly used for non work usecases
- MS controls 2 of the 6 relevant gaming platforms (XBox, PC -- the others are Switch, Playstation, iOS and Android), they happen to also be 2 of the 3 AAA gaming platforms (XBox, PC -- the other is Playstation)
- MS owns a lot of game production
- MS has the go to email solution for companies Outlook as part of Office365
- MS has what some call the best Calendar/schedule Meeting app, also part of Office365
- MS has the go to online meeting platform for companies (teams as part of Office365, through it succks)
- MS has a competitive company chatting platform
- MS competes with Google and Apple in the Cloud
- MS has a not so competitive ad platform
- MS has a semi competitive voice assistant which if integrated with ChatGPT tech could very well become very competitive very fast
- MS doesn't have a phone OS, but a lot control over phone through MDM features integrated into teams/outlook etc.
- MS has one of the main browsers (edge) with a lot of people happily explicitly opting for it or being coerced or tricked into using it (they lost that in the past but regained it). While it pains me its likely more relevant then Firefox by now.
- MS sells PC/Laptop like hardware successfully, but not that competitive
- one of the best standard consumer ergonomic keyboards is from MS
- they still have one of the most widely used presentation and note taking applications
- their database system is still around and sells, not sure why
- they control both of the some of the most widely used IDEs (VS and VSCode)
- they have some experience with AR/VR through I'm not sure about the competitiveness of current products from them
- they made some of the main reasons why people tried out Linux go away by having WSL
- .... I most likely forgot a lot
I.e. all in all: MS is EVERYWHERE with constant faster growing power and control all through the tech space. If it keeps up that way MS will soon be both more powerful then Google and then it ever have been. If they had managed to properly land their phone OS things would be really scary now.
by snowwrestler on 4/17/23, 2:42 PM
Apple used this tactic to put pressure on Google:
2013: Apple Makes Bing The “Default Search Engine” For Siri
https://searchengineland.com/apple-makes-bing-the-default-se...
2017: Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search results on iOS and Spotlight on Mac
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/apple-switches-from-bing-t...
Hard to know if the AI features of Bing are the key factor here for Samsung, or just a handy excuse for Samsung to renegotiate pricing with Google.
by cleandreams on 4/17/23, 7:40 PM
I have begun to find bing search invaluable. It's annoying to use google although I don't even like the bing user interface for AI search. Much too hard to get to. I don't want a single extra keystroke.
by m3kw9 on 4/17/23, 3:28 PM
People want LLM leveraged search, and Google isn't delivering.
by ivanmontillam on 4/17/23, 6:57 PM
I think that Search Engine Optimization as we know it is also going to change forever as well.
Don't be surprised if we start seeing ads like "If you don't appear in Bing/GPT, you don't exist;" we are now in the era of AI-based Search Engine Optimization, or whatever term you want to put it on.
The end result is that the BigAI must know about you and talk about you. You must position yourself in the mind of ChatGPT or similar.
EDIT: How about "Prompt Search Term Optimization" (PSTO)?
by abudabi123 on 4/17/23, 1:51 PM
With the aim of making premium margins from hw/sw products better than Apple without Microsoft, the partnership of Google, Mercedes-Benz, Sony could go far with top cover and Nintendo's superpower patience and as a key point of difference promise to re-supply parts without short fast fashion half lives. I fail to understand how Microsoft gets away with huge market monopoly without correction from parliamentarians confining them to one third or two of industry dominance.
by overthrow on 4/17/23, 1:37 PM
I think the smarter move would be to integrate GPT-4 into Bixby. That's what finally got me to use Bing... it could probably get people to use Bixby too.
by naves on 4/17/23, 9:30 PM
I can imaging Apple mulling about the same for iOS. Microsoft is on a roll and they have the money to challenge Google’s default place in our pockets.
by mannyv on 4/17/23, 1:59 PM
With AI search, you won't have to go to the referenced page to read the content, which will kill the display ad business.
How's google going to get around that?
by post_break on 4/17/23, 2:08 PM
Apple should do the same thing now, twist the knife.
by throwaway4good on 4/17/23, 1:42 PM
Is Google paying Android phone manufacturers for having Google as default search engine similar how they are paying Apple?
by seydor on 4/17/23, 1:30 PM
Samsung has been trying to push that bixby thing on me but if it 's bing instead, i d gladly change
by devnullbrain on 4/17/23, 1:28 PM
This is a very Samsung move: making their premium product feel cheap and cynical to users for easy money.
by nailer on 4/17/23, 1:21 PM
Edit: looks like I'm wrong, see IceWreck's reply below.
Original comment: my understanding is that this means Google will deny their customers access to Google Play, Photos and other first party Google apps. Samsung has replacements for some of these but not all of them.
by jzombie on 4/17/23, 1:23 PM
I can't tell if this Magi project is supposed to be an iteration of Bard or something new.
by kernal on 4/17/23, 3:46 PM
Google should respond by charging Samsung a healthy licensing fee to use Google services and receive security and OS updates. They should also re-evaluate their Android licensing model and make it free for non commercial applications only.
by kazinator on 4/17/23, 7:15 PM
Could it be that Google is pissing off Samsung with their garbage Android releases whose most visible effect is that of actively ruining the user experience?
I can imagine that creates work and headaches for Samsung, and other vendors.
by kramerger on 4/17/23, 1:21 PM
Wait, people actually use the android search box?
It's usually the first thing I remove
by JohnFen on 4/17/23, 8:31 PM
It makes sense, though. Google search is terrible. Bing isn't great, either. But Bing probably charges less, and if there's no real quality difference between the two, why pay more?
by Oras on 4/17/23, 1:57 PM
Looking at how Google managed to "launch" Bard, I do not see how they will convince Samsung from a tech perspective.
Does anyone remember Bard? I hardly see anyone talking about it.
by psuresh on 4/17/23, 1:51 PM
Microsoft Windows survived thanks to Apple on proprietary OS front by not licencing OS separately and Google on open source OS front by not pursuing desktop ChromeOS
by qrck13 on 4/17/23, 4:07 PM
For me that would be a reason to avoid buying Samsung from now on. Can't stand bings UI overloaded with visuals that only distract you.
by king_magic on 4/17/23, 1:15 PM
I mean it is kind of nuts. I didn't have "pretty much switch entirely to Bing" on my 2023 search Bingo card, but here we are.
by ekvintroj on 4/18/23, 1:25 AM
I wouldn't be surprised if they do that, Sammy already forces us to live with MS related bloatware on their phones and tablets.
by anonkogudhyfhhf on 4/17/23, 3:59 PM
Good. Samsung is removing that blogspam of a search
by eclipsetheworld on 4/17/23, 1:27 PM
This article seems a little hyperbolic since I assume the default search engine will simply be the highest bidder...
by mrkramer on 4/17/23, 5:52 PM
Time to shower Samsung with cash.
by rolph on 4/17/23, 3:43 PM
Google needs platforms. platforms only need to browse web. platforms wear the pants.
by natch on 4/17/23, 4:25 PM
Employees being both arrogant and lazy is quite a corrosive dynamic for a company.
by andrewinardeer on 4/17/23, 10:21 PM
It's going to be wild when Bing Maps is superior to Google Maps.
by mensetmanusman on 4/18/23, 3:45 AM
Bing still gives me poor results when I am in science search mode.
by dboreham on 4/17/23, 1:53 PM
How does this happen for me when I use Chrome on my Samsung phone?
by Tempest1981 on 4/17/23, 4:14 PM
How are people pronouncing "Magi"? Same as GIF?
by hn8305823 on 4/17/23, 2:15 PM
The inevitable result of years (decades?) of rest and vest
by thexumaker on 4/17/23, 5:39 PM
lol I'm officially moving off of samsung if this happens. No way in hell I'm using a shitty bing browser
by lasermike026 on 4/17/23, 1:30 PM
Could this be because of GPT at OpenAI(MS).
by jdlyga on 4/17/23, 3:29 PM
Google got too corporate and played things too safe for too long. Imagine if Google released Bard 1 year ago.
by layer8 on 4/17/23, 7:59 PM
Magi? What happened to Bard?
by HacklesRaised on 4/17/23, 3:19 PM
Out of the frying pan, into the fire!
by 29athrowaway on 4/17/23, 4:45 PM
They will become the next Nokia.
by traveler01 on 4/17/23, 1:52 PM
Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? I kept reading news about Google's AI programs, how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI that came up with the biggest hit in AI?
Also, how does Google want people to use their new services if they keep closing them down after their "failure" (a.k.a Google completely forgeting about them and proceeding to close them down).
by sdze on 4/17/23, 2:53 PM
Who cares? People will quickly setup their own default search engine. And I guess it will be Google. Google is a household name. Nobody in the "real" world cares about this AI crap.
by electrosphere on 4/17/23, 1:29 PM
Shame not DuckDuckGo.