Contrary to The New York Times report last month that Samsung was considering dropping Google search engine from its Android smartphones, a new report from The Wall Street Journal reveals that Google Search is staying in Samsung phones. The WSJ disclosed that Samsung may consider adopting Microsoft’s Bing in the near future, but is sticking with Google for the time being.
Although this is not the first time that Samsung would threaten to jettison Google search engine in its phones, Google has always managed to convince the global smartphone manufacturer to keep using its search engine after internal negotiations. Sources suspect that the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT which Microsoft has adopted to power Bing’s search engine may be the reason Samsung wants to switch to Bing.
“Samsung has decided it won’t further internally discuss the matter at this time given concerns over how the switch could be perceived by the market as well as the impact on its wide-ranging business relations with Google,” the WSJ reported.
Internal sources said Google earns about $3 billion yearly from its contract to have Samsung use Google search engine in its smartphones. And that Google was initially shocked and even alarmed at hearing that the smartphone maker may switch to ChatGPT-powered Bing. Samsung had secretly believed that switching from Google to Bing wouldn’t cause any public furor, but now it has and the decision has been rescinded.
So if Samsung considered the new Bing because of its generative AI capabilities, Google has launched its AI Bard chatbot to everyone and will be integrating the AI into its search engine in the coming months. So Samsung may as well stay with Google, especially since many features that make Samsung a competitive smartphone rely on Android technology.
It is on record that Google pays a hefty sum to have Samsung and Apple uses Google Search as the default search engine on their smartphones. And while Samsung and Apple do not likely want to lose this heavy payment, it is also obvious that Google does not want to lose the income coming from people using its search engine on these competing smartphones.