Bing Executive Qi Lu: "We’re serving Billions of queries for iOS Apple users"

Many years ago when Android started to become more popular and eat into the iPhone’s dominance, Apple made a decision to lessen their reliance on Google.  In what became a PR nightmare, Apple created their own mapping solution and stopped using Google Maps.  In addition on the backend, Siri is now powered by Bing.  This was done well over a year ago and an announcement was made at the time.  Up until now we have not had any numbers as to how many queries Bing receives from Siri users.   Qi Lu, the longtime head of Microsoft’s search and online services, shed some light on this in a recent interview with Recode:

We haven’t heard a lot about search in a while. We’ve heard that Yahoo hasn’t been very happy with the partnership. Is it critical to Bing’s future to have that Yahoo partnership?

We’re very happy with the Yahoo partnership. We are strongly committed to do what we can to deepen that partnership.

Scale is indeed a critical part of search for both end user experience and search economics. We are focused on getting more value, getting more scale through organic growth but also through partnerships.

You may know this, but Bing provides back-end services for Apple’s Siri. We’re serving billions of queries for iOS Apple users. Both sides, Apple and us, are very happy with this partnership. That brings more scale.

The other is our partnership with Amazon. On Kindle devices, Bing is also the search default, and we are getting more and more volume. That’s still early. We see a lot of opportunities to drive more partnerships.

Source: Recode