Google was reported to be in a ‘panic’ after it emerged Samsung was considering dropping the company’s ubiquitous search engine for Microsoft’s Bing as the default on its devices.

Internal messages seen by the New York Times revealed the fallout from the discovery. The paper reported Google’s contract with Samsung is worth an estimated $3billion (£242million) – last year Samsung shipped more than 250million handsets. A similar contract with Apple worth $20billion is up for renewal this year.

Bing was launched in 2009 to replace Microsoft’s Live Search, but has so far failed to grab a sizeable share of the market, a field long ruled by Google. Billions of people use the search engine daily.

However, following the launch of OpenAI’s groundbreaking Large Language Model program ChatGPT, Microsoft – an investor in the company – incorporated its own version of the chatbot into Bing and its Edge browser.

Internal documents reviewed by the New York Times revealed Google is racing to compete, with plans to build an AI-powered search engine. 

It is also working to upgrade the existing flagship search engine with AI features under the project name Magi. A team of 160 people are reported to be working on the project, with a potential rollout to a limited number of US customers as early as May.

A Google spokesperson said: ‘We’ve been bringing AI to Google Search for years to not only dramatically improve the quality of our results, but also introduce entirely new ways to search, such as Lens and multisearch.

‘We’ve done so in a responsible and helpful way that maintains the high bar we set for delivering quality information.

‘Not every brainstorm deck or product idea leads to a launch, but as we’ve said before, we’re excited about bringing new AI-powered features to Search, and will share more details soon.’

The Times added that modernising its search engine had become an ‘obsession’ at Google. 

However, Google’s own ChatGPT rival Bard had a difficult launch. In its initial public demonstration, Bard incorrectly stated that the James Webb Space Telescope had captured the first image of an exoplanet – a planet outside our own solar system – when in fact astronomers achieved this 14 years before the telescope was launched. 

The mistake wiped $100billion off the value of Google’s parent company Alphabet.

Metro.co.uk has contacted Samsung for comment. Microsoft declined to comment.

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