Microsoft executives held talks with Apple executives three years ago to try to sell them Bing, which would make it a better option on Apple devices than Google, sources cited by Bloomberg say.

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In 2020, Microsoft executives met with Eddie Cue, Apple’s head of services, to see if the Cupertino giant would be interested in buying Bing.

Sources said there were only exploratory talks, but no advanced phase was reached. Apple employees have long agreed with Google that the search engine is used by default on Apple terminals, and Google pays several billion a year for this, between 4 and 7 billion dollars to be exact.

According to the sources, Apple decided there was no reason to abandon the deal with Google, and Apple executives also believe that Google’s search engine is technically better than Bing, a search engine launched by Microsoft in 2009 that has only a few percent of the market. .

A lot was written about Bing at the beginning of the year, when Microsoft launched the Bing AI chatbot.

The first partnership agreements between Apple and Google were signed in 2002.

Bing has been the default system on many Apple devices for several years, but Apple has switched to Google again.

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