Microsoft Corp. executives floated the possibility of selling Bing to Apple Inc. a few years ago, according to a new report.

Sources told Bloomberg on Thursday that the idea came up in 2020. Microsoft executives reportedly met with Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, to discuss a potential deal. Bloomberg’s sources said that the goal of the sale would have been to replace Google with Bing as the default search engine on iOS. 

Apple Inc. has offered Google LLC’s search engine as the default option in its products for 20 years. When the companies launched their partnership in 2003, it initially focused on the Mac version of Safari. Google has since become the default search in iOS, Siri and other Apple products. 

The Alphabet Inc. unit pays billions of dollars a year to Apple to retain its position as the default search provider for iPhones. The sum is not a fixed amount, but rather a percentage of the revenue Google generates from searches that users make in Safari.

It’s believed that the 2020 offer to sell Bing wasn’t Microsoft’s first attempt to replace Google as the default search provider for iOS. Microsoft reportedly considered making a “multibillion-dollar investment in its relationship with Apple” in 2016. Tim Cook and Satya Nadella reportedly met to discuss the proposal, but the iPhone maker eventually decided to renew its deal with Google. 

The U.S. Justice Department is currently suing Google over its search partnership with Apple and a number of similar agreements it has in place with other companies. The lawsuit, which was filed in 2020, charges that the Alphabet unit pays Apple $4 billion to $7 billion per year to keep its search engine as the default option on iOS. Justice Department officials argue that this arrangement amounts to an anticompetitive business practice.

The case went to trial earlier this month. Depending on the outcome of the lawsuit, Apple could potentially be required to stop accepting payments from Google as part of their search engine deal.

According to Bloomberg’s sources, those payments are the main reason the iPhone maker decided against buying Bing in 2020. This means the antitrust lawsuit may increase Microsoft’s chances of making Bing the default search engine on iPhones. Furthermore, smaller players in the search engine market could potentially benefit as well. 

According to this week’s report, there was also a second reason Apple didn’t acquire Bing. When the sale was floated three years ago, the iPhone maker reportedly had qualms about the search engine’s feature set and its ability to compete with Google in the user experience department.

Microsoft has since made several major enhancements to Bing. In February, it added a chatbot that can generate natural language responses to user queries. Microsoft released the chatbot alongside a number of other improvements that increased the relevance of standard search results. 

Bing reportedly had a market share of about 3% in July. In May, Microsoft disclosed that the search engine surpassed 100 million daily active users.

Image: Microsoft