People are acting like Bing has created some big market success and Samsung is running to them because the tech is better. But the alternative explanation is simple: vendors are always looking for reasons to (threaten to) put mediocre non-Google search as default on their products, so they can extract more money from search engine providers. Samsung sees the current hype around Bing/Google/AI as a convenient negotiating point, since the media will portray this as “Samsung switches to awesome AI search” rather than “Samsung forces its users to use crummy Bing.”
The users who pay attention to search quality aren't impacted by the default search option. They will just go back to Google or whatever alternative they wish.
The users who the default engine really locks in are the ones who just mostly click ads and have no idea they are ads. When they use Google they are mostly clicking ads anyways, so the search result quality will appear about the same with Bing. Maybe even better if there are fewer ads.
For Microsoft, getting more users on board means higher ad volume which brings more advertisers who are going to spend the time to manage Bing ad campaigns. You can bet they've done the calculations for how much money they can spend at what price. Ultimately that leads to higher monetization and then Microsoft can pay other companies (like Apple) to switch the default engine.
Google is a multi-trillion dollar attention tax that just sucks money from the global economy. They've been wildly mismanaged since Eric Schmidt's CEO tenure ended. It's been a long time coming, but the timer is running out of sand for Google fast. The revenue may take a long time to peak and decline but when they start missing their quarterly earnings it will be a bloodbath for Google's employees.
I think the problem is Google is also pretty crummy. Ai is in a golden age without poisoned data right now. But wait until Bing gets popular and blackhat seo types start poisoning chatgpt. It will stop being useful, and I suspect in a way that will be unfixable since these language models are so hard to wrangle.
There's another side to that medal: At the moment nobody takes any issue with OpenAI doing filtering and curation in deciding what is part of their training data set, aside from perhaps the anti-bias crowd. "AI neutrality" is not yet a topic. Yet.
I've already seen that several times with image generation. Most recently was an article commenting on how the American smile was polluting generated photos. People can't decide what they want. Do they want licensed, curated commercial photos in the database or do they want search engine style neutrality? You really can't have both.
Your tone subs like you're contradicting a point, but your actual comment is completely in like with the idea that Google has been caught by surprise that Bing is good enough (as measured by market sentiment) to be a credible threat.
