And Finally! Apple brushed off Bing for its lack of Annie Lennox knowledge

You know the multiple times a day when you half recall a TV theme tune from your childhood, or want to know how old a celebrity is, or you suddenly decide you need to know how to whittle? What do you do? You whip out your phone and search. And which search engine delivers you the results in the 704th tab you’ve opened in your browser may well have been decided by one person - Annie Lennox.

Now, in this familiar but imagined scenario, you are on an Apple device. You also use Apple’s own Safari browser. And you have not - this is important - you have not changed the default search engine. You haven’t even thought about it. Why would you? Everything is just fine. No need to change anything at all. It’s a beautiful and simple system that is thanks, once again, to former Eurythmics vocalist Annie Lennox.

You see, maybe at the end of the first paragraph there, you stopped to check what band Annie Lennox used to be in. You whipped out your iPhone, opened Safari, and searched “What band was Annie Lennox in because somehow I don’t know that despite the fact that I am a human who is alive?” And what would have come back? Yes, a Google search results page telling you that, of course, Annie Lennox used to be in Eurythmics.

Were you a bit more inquisitive, you might have wondered what band Annie Lennox was in before Eurythmics. And Google would have given that information. It was The Tourists. Their big hit was a cover of Dusty Springfield’s ‘I Only Want To Be With You’, which they released in 1979. Saved you an extra search break there.

Had you done that search on Microsoft Bing though, it would have told you nothing of the sort. Not if you were doing it in 2018 anyway. And that’s why Bing isn’t used by any iPhone users, except people who have actively chosen to because they’re weird.

This has all arisen in a new filing as part of Google’s ongoing antitrust case against the US government. According The Register, it contains a reference to a testimony by John Giannandrea, Apple's Vice President of Machine Learning & AI Strategy.

Back in 2018, Microsoft had approached Apple in the hope of usurping Google as Safari’s default search engine. Think of the boost that would have given Microsoft’s search platform, which currently has a worldwide market share under 3.5% and back then even less. An Apple deal would have made Bing the default search engine for millions of Apple-device-owning people wanting to know the differences between how Americans and Europeans use a knife and fork - or whatever - every second of every day.

The problem was, Giannandrea wasn’t confident that Bing would give them the correct answer to important queries about when people started running for pleasure and not just to get away from attacking animals. Or whatever. Other queries are available.

So he did some testing of Bing’s abilities. He had other reservations - none of which involved pop stars, so are of no interest to us - but the one that broke the camel’s back seems to have been the Annie Lennox question.

“What was Annie Lennox’s first band?”

When Giannandrea asked Bing this question, it returned results that only referenced Eurythmics. No mention of the fact that before forming that band, she and Dave Stewart had been members of The Tourists for four years. Not even an inkling that they might have had a hit with a cover of Dusty Springfield’s ‘I Only Want To Be With You’ in 1979. Or that they released three albums together, two of which also came out in 1979.

All key information that you’d want when trying to find out what Annie Lennox’s first band was. And if Bing couldn’t serve up that information, then it sure as hell wasn’t going to make it as Safari’s default search engine, entirely responsible for letting people know things like what other films that guy who is in this film you’re watching right now has been in.

Google on the other hand, well, let me tell you, I just searched “Annie Lennox first band” over there and it provides a little snippet of the Eurythmics Wikipedia page telling me that Lennox was vocalist in The Tourists prior to forming Eurythmics, and brought up ‘I Only Want To Be With You’ at the top of a list of YouTube videos. There’s even a little snippet further down that tells me that The Tourists were briefly called The Catch. This is great info, guys.

This is all somewhat buried amongst more general information about Lennox and Eurythmics, but fine, there’s no arguing that the information is there.

In the interests of fairness, I thought I’d better do this test on Bing as well. When I entered my query, it promptly loaded up a page that proclaimed right at the top, “The Tourists according to two sources”.

Hmm, that’s actually quite good, isn’t it? It also jumbled in a load of less relevant information, but you can’t argue that it got right to the point, giving me the answer to my question before I saw anything else. Maybe Apple was a little hasty to bat Bing away, because it seems to have done some decent Lennox learning since 2018

It even quotes the two sources that it was drawing from underneath the answer. The first is Lennox’s Wikipedia page, which says, as clear as day, “In 1976, Lennox was a flute player with a band called Dragon's Playground”.

Hang on, what? Bing has apparently proven Google wrong, but only by accident while being wrong as well. Now I just don’t know who to trust. I wish I’d never even heard of Annie bloody Lennox.

Oh hey, you know what though? There have been other music news stories we’ve found this week that have made us laugh. And it would seem mean to keep them to ourselves now. So here they are below. It’ll save you a Google search at least. You won’t even have to ask Bing…