Siri Can Also Search Bing and Yahoo

If you’ve spent any time with Siri, you may have noticed that you can actually ask it to search the web for pretty much anything. At this point, Siri fires up a Google search and populates the search field with whatever it thinks you asked. The degree of accuracy here very much depends on your accent and whether it’s a full moon or not, but on the whole, it does the job fairly well.

But did you know that you can also have Siri work its magic with both the Microsoft Bing and Yahoo search engines? Well, you can…

In a post on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan reminds us that, should Google not be your search engine of choice, you can always tell Siri which flavor of search you wish to use.

The key is adding the word “Bing” or “Yahoo” to your query, such as, “search Bing for weather” or “search yahoo for Apple earnings.” Siri heads off to the relevant search engine, and you’re golden.

If you prefer to use any one search engine as a default, you can always set that in the iPhone’s Settings, in which case you’d need to say “search Google” to use Google.com. Either way, there’s a little more flexibility here than we first thought.

Of course, if you can’t get Siri to understand you, then this is all a bit moot.