Samsung was exploring the idea of replacing Google with Bing as the default search engine in their mobile browser. However, they have decided not to go forward with it. Bing has recently been in the news due to its GPT-4 integration (which is what powers ChatGPT) and it rode the ChatGPT hype cycle up the charts to draw in some users.
However, the hype has started to simmer down a little considering that people are getting a better idea about how generative AI models work, as well as their flaws. Being the default search engine on a Samsung phone is a big deal because people frequently use the default search engine they are provided (largely because they don’t know how to change it) instead of switching to one they prefer.
Bing would have drawn quite a few customers away from Google if they went through with it. However, Bing is historically unpopular — despite being heavily promoted by Microsoft. That means Samsung could have ended up aggravating customers who have a strong preference for Google, although it would be little more than an annoyance because they can always change it back to Google — or just type ‘google.com’ in their browsers.
Other users who aren’t fond of Google nor Bing never had them set as the default out of the box, so they had to seek out their own preferred search engines and set them as the default themselves. Common examples are the privacy-friendly Startpage, DuckDuckGo, QWant, and Brave Search. Growing interest in privacy-friendly search engines has led to major browser vendors adding the four browsers above as options to make their default search engines.
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