Apple makes Bing Siri’s default search engine

Siri iOS 7 1

“The enemy of my enemy, is my friend.” That proverb seems fitting for the new Bing partnership Apple announced today, which sees Microsoft’s lackluster search engine tapped as the default search engine for the snarky digital assistant Siri.

The entire audience went silent during the keynote this morning, as Apple’s SVP of Internet software and services Eddy Cue announced that new in iOS 7, Siri will be able to respond to queries with integrated Bing web search results…

Of course, the news won’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention to the tech world. Between their ongoign patent war, and head-to-head competition with Android, Apple has been trying to distance itself from Google for a while now.

But Bing? Really?

Bing Corporate Vice President Derrick Connell took to the Bing blog this afternoon to talk about the collaboration:

“Starting this fall with iOS 7, Bing will power Siri’s new integrated web search. When users ask Siri a question either the specific answer or web search links will now be delivered automatically so users can find information even faster.

Bing was designed from the outset to be a great place for web search helping customers quickly find what they are looking for and get more out of search. We are thrilled that all the great results people have come to know and love on Bing.com will now be available to Siri users on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Making sure customers can have access to the power of Bing where and when they need it has been a big focus of the work we have done over the past few years, and we are excited to work with Apple to deliver it to Siri users this fall.”

Though I’d [obviously] rather see Google search results integrated into Siri, I don’t think the Bing deal is a bad thing. The more resources the digital assistant can pull from to answer your queries and requests, the more useful the feature will be.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens in mobile Safari. For the moment, Google is still the default search engine there, and I believe the two have a long-standing deal in place for that. But folks thought they had a long-standing deal for Maps too.

What do you think?