Apple’s Siri has pushed Bing even further down the web search rankings, as it drops the search engine for the sleek and fast Google engine. Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant, is available on nearly all Apple products and commonly searches the web to answer user’s questions like “How fast is the speed of light?” or “Search for upcoming movies”. Until recently, both Siri and Amazon’s assistant (Alexa) relied on Bing to provide answers to these and many other questions.
With a search engine market share of over 97%, it is surprising that Apple took so long to make the switch. Bing’s share is currently 2%, but is no doubt dropping after Apple’s pullout. For now, Amazon Alexa and Yahoo still use Bing’s engine.
As numerous other virtual assistants hit the market, Siri has been criticized for its inaccuracy and limited capabilities. In a test of accuracy, four popular virtual assistants (Google Assistant, Cortana, Siri, and Amazon Alexa) were asked 5,000 factual questions and were judged based on number answered and percent correct. Google Assistant attempted to answer 3,405 of the 5,000 questions, with 91% accuracy of questions answered. Siri, on the other hand, did the worst and was only 62% accurate on the 1,085 questions she attempted to answer.
From tests like these, Apple quickly learned that utilizing Bing has severely limited Siri’s capabilities. Apple is throwing Bing a bone as it has agreed to use the search engine for photo searches like, “Search the web for photos of puppies”. With the last remaining major tech industries ditching Bing for Google, it is not clear how long the outdated search engine will last. But Apple users should be happy knowing Siri will be able to provide more accurate answers to a wider variety of questions.