The newly disclosed testimony record of John Giannandrea, Apple's senior vice president of machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy and a former Google executive, shows that Apple considered acquiring Microsoft's Bing search engine in 2018, or forming a joint venture with Bing and making "billion-dollar investments."

At the time, Giannandria said, Apple was considering using Bing instead of Google to respond to some Siri queries and power other features on iPhones and Macs.

It is estimated that Google pays Apple up to $19 billion per year to become the default search engine on Apple products.

But the deal with Microsoft ultimately failed to come to fruition, and Giannandria said he believed Apple CEO Tim Cook personally told Microsoft that the deal would not proceed.

"Obviously, if we entered into a joint venture with Bing, it would have an impact on the relationship with Google," Giannandria said in testimony last week.

The depositions are part of a federal antitrust lawsuit against Google, and Judge Amit Mehta, who is presiding over the case, ruled Wednesday that he will make public the testimony of DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg and Apple executive Giannandria, except for trade secrets, such as the names of projects within Apple and the exact financial data being discussed.

When discussing Apple's considerations about whether to acquire or invest in Bing in 2018, Giannandria cited an internal report from Apple's head of business development, Adrian Perica, in which he outlined four scenarios for Apple and Microsoft: growing Siri organically, collaborating on a technology called the Knowledge Graph, co-owning Bing, or acquiring Bing.

Giannandria is Apple's senior vice president of machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy. Since joining Apple in 2018, he has been responsible for improving features such as the Siri voice assistant and Spotlight, the company's device search function. Before that, he worked in search at Google.

Much of his testimony centered around discussions within Apple about improving Siri and Spotlight, both of which can feed queries to Google without ready answers. The Justice Department is trying to argue that Apple might have invested more in its own search technology if it hadn't struck a lucrative deal with Google.

Giannandria said he doesn't think Apple has a "universal" search engine because it doesn't have a search results page, but it competes for queries through autocomplete "suggestions" in Siri, Spotlight and Safari, which can answer questions using Apple technology and then send them to Google.

He said that Google had not yet decided whether to build its own universal search engine, which would be a costly undertaking.

Giannandria added that he believed Cook met with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in the summer of 2018, which started an internal discussion about whether Apple should strengthen its partnership with Bing. He explained that starting in August of that year, he and Apple's business development chief Adrian Perica had two or three meetings with Microsoft.

"I will say that we have openly discussed whether we could do more things together, and my understanding is that that could include the option of acquiring Bing from Microsoft," Giannandria said.

Giannandria said Microsoft had hinted that it might be willing to be "very flexible" in sharing advertising revenue if the two sides reached a partnership.

"I think we had a series of meetings in response to the first meeting with Microsoft to discuss advertising in general and Apple's strategy in advertising," Giannandria said.

He also mentioned that Cook asked about slowing revenue growth from the Google deal in August 2018, saying that the main driver of the revenue share with Google would be "the number of queries sent to Google."

Giannandria said Microsoft is interested in paying Apple to improve its search engine, including expanding it into more international markets.

Giannandria said several times in his testimony that he was skeptical of Bing's claims and whether it would be a vast improvement over Google. In December 2018, he sent Cook an email explaining his reservations. He also compared Bing and Google search in 2021 to understand the progress Microsoft has made, and found that Google is significantly better in mobile search.

During his testimony, Giannandria also mentioned Apple's current work in search technology, noting that the company is increasing its investment in web crawling to advance its work on language models, one of the most popular forms of artificial intelligence in the tech industry.

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