Apple Drops Bing Search Engine Results for Siri and Spotlight in Favor of Google

[Nikhil72]

Presuming Siri Search Results pull from google search too? Anyone know?

 

[Hater]

You guys all know that DuckDuckGo results are all done via Bing as well, right?

I use DuckDuckGo on everything.

 

[Jsameds]

I think one of the reasons Siri feels so behind Google, is that when Siri displays web results it feels like Siri has failed.

If you ask Siri to "tell me about the new iPhone" it will recommend Apple's website and throw up a link. If you ask Siri to "tell me about the new Samsung phone" it will perform a web search which includes Samsung's website as the first result.

In a way, it gives you the same information. But web results in Siri feel like a "fail safe". Does Google Now distinguish between an instance of understanding vs not understanding at all?

I’ve never used any of the others extensively to be honest, but I hear from both partial and impartial sources that Siri lags in comparison, and from my own experience with Siri I agree it needs a lot of work.

It’s still early days in the field of voice assistants believe it or not, but with the intro of the machine learning chips in iPhone and the internal shift of staff I belive it’s going to get a lot better sooner rather than later.

I just hope Apples focus on privacy won’t hinder it too much vs the competition, but I’d still take a slightly not a as good but secure VA over better one that disregards privacy any day of the week, much like I do with operating systems currently.

 

[supercoolmanchu]

Who uses Spotlight or Siri to do web searches? So lame and ghetto.

Safari’s address bar search is faster and better. More results, speedier and one less extraneous ‘non-browser screen’ between actually getting to the browser.

However there’s no good reason for either Spotlight or Siri to not use Safari’s default web search setting, for ya know... web searches.

One more ominous sign that Tim Cook is asleep at the wheel this year.

 

[B60boy]

Does this mean that I can finally ditch the Google Search app? If this siri/spotlight search goes thru google at some point of the query, I dont see a reason to have the full blown Google Search app. I can finally get rid of it. I'm I thinking this correctly?

 

[bwillwall]

It's never going to happen. YouTube 4k uses VP9 and Apple will never add it because it's a Google codec and decoding would have to be done in software and would therefore be terrible for battery life. HEVC is the industry standard and Apple has already added support for it to all its products and hardware decoding of HEVC has been on its chips since the A9.

Gotta keep that Apple TV battery life high... wait
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I find this kind of odd. Coming from a privacy first. I dunno what to think. but whatever it is, its probably a good move.

Just not a reason i can think of right now..



DuckDuckGo is designed to protect our privacy *more*.... That wouldn't mean it would 100%, but I would trust it more than Google. But Apple purchasing it,,, Not in your life, i can't imagine a world where Apple is no longer 'Apple.'

Apple sells other products via another name, a company called "Beats" you may have heard of?

 

[Philip_S]

Well, Macrumours, you've done it. You've complained officially about everything. No people in their right mind would prefer Bing over Google. Of course, I would have thought that before checking the comments.

stop trolling............"More relevant search results than Google"

I’d say it does a better job of not returning useless crap like those sites that scrape stack overflow, and often a better job of avoiding blogspam. That might be because all their SEO targets Google instead, but from a user’s POV that hardly matters.

It also seems to be less “helpful” in interpreting your query (though I wish you could force modern search engines into an old-style advanced search, preferably with the refinements used by systems like clusty or dogpile). Google doing that can be useful, but sometimes you want them to stop helping and just get out of your way.