San Francisco — In a surprising turn of events, Amazon is making everyone alert and take notice with its recently announced array of new Kindles. And for all the ballyhoo with this launch, there is something a bit odd about the new Kindle Fires: the tablets may run on Google’s Android operating system… yet the default search engine on the device will be Microsoft’s Bing, instead of Google, it looks like Amazon is trying to cut the business partnership with Google.
While no official confirmation of this has been released as yet, Amazon and Microsoft have confirmed it to various media outlets. Thus, getting its search engine onto the Kindle Fire is a huge coup for Microsoft, which definitely is a big win for Microsoft, all Web searches will be routed through Bing as the default search engine on the Kindle Fire HD.
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The leak was noticed first by UberGizmo at Amazon’s press conference in Santa Monica this week, the default search engine used in the search box of the Web browser was Microsoft’s Bing. This could mean a lot of traffic loss to the world’s most adopted search engine, because being the default search engine of devices such as the Kindle Fire and a lot of other browsers and devices is how Google gets so much of visitors and page views.
According to confirmations from Microsoft and Amazon, all Kindle Fire tablets will be bundled with Bing as the preset default for the search box. While users have the choice of switching the search engine employed by the search box within the browser settings to another service like Google or Yahoo, it is unlikely that the average consumer will bother to swap out the search engine. In the first version of the Kindle Fire released last year, the default search engine was Google. According to Amazon, Bing will now replace Google in the revamped Kindle Fire and all versions of the Kindle Fire HD.
In fact, this could mean a big blow to Google. If companies such as Apple and Amazon stop using Google’s services, the company will be left with Android alone. And if OEMs take the path that Amazon took, of using Android’s base for building their own operating system, then Google will have to start building new products. Android Authority writes:
Eliane Fiolet of Ubergizmo was able to get a hands-on experience with a Kindle Fire HD, and were quite surprised to find that the tablet’s Silk mobile browser had Bing as the default search engine.
“Bing comes as the default for Silk, Amazon says, but users will have the option of switching to Google or Yahoo if they wish,” writes Eric Abent at Slashgear. Eric speculates that Microsoft may have sponsored Bing’s prominent placement in Amazon’s Silk browser, although the company would not comment on the matter
Most surprisingly not only this, but Apple is slowly but surely moving away from using Google Maps on the tablet to Nokia’s Ovi Maps. And not just Amazon, a lot of other companies are also trying to reduce their dependency on Google’s content and services. For instance, Apple has decided to ditch the YouTube app on its new iOS 6 mobile operating system along with Google Maps.