Have you tried using Bing? What do you think? I’m pretty sure your answer is that Google is better. Well, know that there is someone very important who agrees with you: Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. He declared this to the U.S. court, during a government lawsuit against Google for alleged monopoly.
For Nadella, Google is better because it’s the most widely used. The same goes for Bing, with a switched signal: it’s worse because fewer people use it. It may seem counterintuitive, but that’s really his logic.
The executive considers that Bing is in a vicious cycle. Because it has fewer users, it gets less data about what people search for and what the most accessed results are. Thus, it delivers worse results, which causes fewer people to use it. With fewer people using it, the search engine has less data and… You understand where this is going.
Bing wanted to become the iPhone’s search engine
A crucial point would be to be able to become the default search engine on the iPhone. Nadella says he was prepared to lose $15 billion a year in a deal with Apple. For the CEO, Google’s deal with the apple brand is a “fantastic deal, simply oligopolistic”.
“Standards are the only thing that matters in terms of changing user behavior,” he said.
Nadella also said that it’s “” that it’s easy to change the pattern. “You wake up in the morning, brush your teeth, and do a Google search. With this level of habit formation, the only way to change is to change the default [search engine].”
Google can dominate AI as well
One of the ways to increase Bing’s popularity was to put artificial intelligence tools in the search engine. Microsoft is one of OpenAI’s biggest investors and has coupled technologies such as GPT and Dall-E to its search engine.
Will that be enough to change the market? Nadella was less enthusiastic than in recent months.
He considers that search engines depend on the websites that create content. With the growth of AI systems, platforms and publishers are becoming more concerned with the technology and how its output is used to train these models.
One possibility is that they start signing exclusivity deals with Google, which could crush the competition.
Here’s a caveat: Nadella was testifying in a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against Google, which is one of his biggest competitors. It makes sense that he was painting Google as a major villain. On other occasions, the tone was far less pessimistic.
In an interview in February, for example, the CEO said that the search giant will have to show that it can dance, and that he would be happy if people knew that it was Microsoft that got Google dancing.
