Gone are the days when Apple's resident voice assistants in iOS devices and MacBooks, Siri and Spotlight, used the Bing search in finding answers to the users' queries. Starting today, the Cupertino-based tech company is employing Google to get the most relevant results from the web.
As reported by Tech Crunch, Apple was expected to finalize the transition of the default search engine from Bing to Google yesterday. Specifically, Spotlight and Siri will be ditching Bing in favor of Google to surf the web for the usual text search results. As for video searches made through Siri and Spotlight, Google is expected to return YouTube links as the search result.
To explain their sudden move to switch from Bing to Google, Apple told Tech Crunch that the changes will "allow these services to have a consistent web search experience with the default in Safari." However, Apple also said that Siri and Spotlight searches will not completely get rid of the Bing service, as the latter will still be used to yield image results from the web.
According to Tech Spot, the shift from Bing to Google for Siri and Spotlight's search feature aims to make the web results more accurate and relevant for the benefit of the users. There are speculations that the transition to Google search should have happened years ago, if not for Bing paying billions of dollars to keep the company's agreement with Apple to be the latter's default search engine.
Nevertheless, the relationship between Apple and Microsoft, the tech giant behind the Bing search bar, appears to be going well in spite of the recent changes. The Redmond-based tech company said in an official statement that they still "look forward to continuing to partner with them in many ways." After all, Bing image search is still being used by Siri, believing that the search feature offers quality results.
To note, the change from Bing to Google for Siri and Spotlight services was implemented at the same time when the latest macOS update, High Sierra, was released.
