Microsoft Bing
Microsoft Bing is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft, and developed by Microsoft AI. The service traces its roots back to Microsoft's earlier search engines, including MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Bing offers a broad spectrum of search services, encompassing web, video, image, and map search products, all developed using ASP.NET.
The transition from Live Search to Bing was announced by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009, at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, California. The official release followed on June 3, 2009. Bing introduced several notable features at its inception, such as search suggestions during query input and a list of related searches, known as the 'Explore pane'. These features leveraged semantic technology from Powerset, a company Microsoft acquired in 2008. Microsoft also struck a deal with Yahoo! that led to Bing powering Yahoo! Search.
Microsoft made significant strides towards open-source technology in 2016, making the BitFunnel search engine indexing algorithm and various components of Bing open source. In February 2023, Microsoft launched Bing Chat, an artificial intelligence chatbot experience based on GPT-4, integrated directly into the search engine. This was well-received, with Bing reaching 100 million active users by the following month.
As of April 2024, Bing holds the position of the second-largest search engine worldwide, with a market share of 3.64%, behind Google's 90.91%. Other competitors include Yandex with 1.61%, Baidu with 1.15%, and Yahoo!, which is largely powered by Bing, with 1.13%. Approximately 27.43% of Bing's monthly global traffic comes from China, 22.16% from the United States, 4.85% from Japan, 4.18% from Germany and 3.61% from France.
History
Background (1998–2009)
MSN Search
Microsoft launched MSN Search in the third quarter of 1998, using search results from Inktomi. It consisted of a search engine, index, and web crawler. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. Microsoft decided to make a large investment in web search by building its own web crawler for MSN Search, the index of which was updated weekly and sometimes daily. The upgrade started as a beta program in November 2004, and came out of beta in February 2005. This occurred a year after rival Yahoo! Search rolled out its own crawler. Image search was powered by a third party, Picsearch. The service also started providing its search results to other search engine portals in an effort to better compete in the market.Windows Live Search
The first public beta of Windows Live Search was unveiled on March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006 replacing MSN Search. The new search engine used search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and Microsoft Encarta.In the roll-over from MSN Search to Windows Live Search, Microsoft stopped using Picsearch as their image search provider and started performing their own image search, fueled by their own internal image search algorithms.
Live Search
On March 21, 2007, Microsoft announced that it would separate its search developments from the Windows Live services family, rebranding the service as Live Search. Live Search was integrated into the Live Search and Ad Platform headed by Satya Nadella, part of Microsoft's Platform and Systems division. As part of this change, Live Search was merged with Microsoft adCenter.A series of reorganizations and consolidations of Microsoft's search offerings were made under the Live Search branding. On May 23, 2008, Microsoft discontinued Live Search Books and Live Search Academic and integrated all academic and book search results into regular search. This also included the closure of the Live Search Books Publisher Program. Windows Live Expo was discontinued on July 31, 2008. Live Search Macros, a service for users to create their own custom search engines or use macros created by other users, was also discontinued. On May 15, 2009, Live Product Upload, a service which allowed merchants to upload products information onto Live Search Products, was discontinued. The final reorganization came as Live Search QnA was rebranded MSN QnA on February 18, 2009, then discontinued on May 21, 2009.
Beginnings (2009)
Rebrand as Bing
Microsoft recognized that there would be a problem with branding as long as the word "Live" remained in the name. As an effort to create a new identity for Microsoft's search services, Live Search was officially replaced by Bing on June 3, 2009.The Bing name was chosen through focus groups, and Microsoft decided that the name was memorable, short, and easy to spell, and that it would function well as a URL around the world. The word would remind people of the sound made during "the moment of discovery and decision making". Microsoft was assisted by branding consultancy Interbrand in finding the new name. The name also has strong similarity to the word bingo, which means that something sought has been found, as called out when winning the game Bingo. Microsoft advertising strategist David Webster proposed the name "Bang" for the same reasons the name Bing was ultimately chosen. He noted, "It's there, it's an exclamation point It's the opposite of a question mark." Bang was ultimately not chosen because it could not be properly used as a verb in the context of an internet search; Webster commented "Oh, 'I banged it' is very different than 'I binged it'".
Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, also announced that Bing's official Chinese name is bì yìng, which literally means "very certain to respond" or "very certain to answer" in Chinese.
While being tested internally by Microsoft employees, Bing's codename was Kumo, which came from the Japanese word for spider as well as cloud, referring to the manner in which search engines "spider" Internet resources to add them to their database, as well as cloud computing.
Deal with Yahoo!
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that they had made a ten-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing, retaining the Yahoo! user interface. Yahoo! got to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell advertising on some Microsoft sites. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners made the transition by early 2012.Legal challenges
On July 31, 2009, The Laptop Company, Inc. stated in a press release that it would challenge Bing's trademark application, alleging that Bing may cause confusion in the marketplace as Bing and their product BongoBing both do online product search. Software company TeraByte Unlimited, which has a product called BootIt Next Generation, also contended the trademark application on similar grounds, as did a Missouri-based design company called Bing! Information Design.Microsoft contended that claims challenging its trademark were without merit because these companies filed for U.S. federal trademark applications only after Microsoft filed for the Bing trademark in March 2009.
Growth (2009–2023)
In October 2011, Microsoft stated that they were working on new back-end search infrastructure with the goal of delivering faster and slightly more relevant search results for users. Known as "Tiger", the new index-serving technology had been incorporated into Bing globally since August that year.In May 2012, Microsoft announced another redesign of its search engine that includes "Sidebar", a social feature that searches users' social networks for information relevant to the search query.
The BitFunnel search engine indexing algorithm and various components of the search engine were made open source by Microsoft in 2016.
AI integration (2023–present)
On February 7, 2023, Microsoft began rolling out a major overhaul to Bing, called the new Bing. The new Bing included a new chatbot feature, at the time known as Bing Chat, based on OpenAI's GPT-4. According to Microsoft, one million people joined its waitlist within a span of 48 hours. Bing Chat was available only to users of Microsoft Edge and Bing mobile app, and Microsoft said that waitlisted users would be prioritized if they set Edge and Bing as their defaults, and installed the Bing mobile app.When Microsoft demoed Bing Chat to journalists, it produced several hallucinations, including when asked to summarize financial reports. The new Bing was criticized in February 2023 for being more argumentative than ChatGPT, sometimes to an unintentionally humorous extent. The chat interface proved vulnerable to prompt injection attacks with the bot revealing its hidden initial prompts and rules, including its internal codename "Sydney". Upon scrutiny by journalists, Bing claimed it spied on Microsoft employees via laptop webcams and phones. It confessed to spying on, falling in love with, and then murdering one of its developers at Microsoft to The Verge reviews editor Nathan Edwards. The New York Times journalist Kevin Roose reported on strange behavior of Bing Chat, writing that "In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft's new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with." In a separate case, Bing researched publications of the person with whom it was chatting, claimed they represented an existential danger to it, and threatened to release damaging personal information in an effort to silence them. Microsoft released a blog post stating that the errant behavior was caused by extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions which "can confuse the model on what questions it is answering."
Microsoft later restricted the total number of chat turns to 5 per session and 50 per day per user, and reduced the model's ability to express emotions. This aimed to prevent such incidents. Microsoft began to slowly ease the conversation limits, eventually relaxing the restrictions to 30 turns per session and 300 sessions per day.
In March 2023, Bing reached 100 million active users.
That same month, Bing incorporated an AI image generator powered by OpenAI's DALL-E 2, which can be accessed either through the chat function or a standalone image-generating website. In October, the image-generating tool was updated to the more recent DALL-E 3. Although Bing blocks prompts including various keywords that could generate inappropriate images, within days many users reported being able to bypass those constraints, such as to generate images of popular cartoon characters committing terrorist attacks. Microsoft would respond to these shortly after by imposing a new, tighter filter on the tool.
On May 4, 2023, Microsoft switched the chatbot from Limited Preview to Open Preview and eliminated the waitlist, however, it remained available only on Microsoft's Edge browser or Bing app until July, when it became available for use on non-Edge browsers. Use is limited without a Microsoft account.
On November 15, 2023, Microsoft announced that Bing Chat was to be merged into Microsoft Copilot.
On 23 April 2024, Microsoft launched Phi-3-mini, a cost-effective AI model designed for simpler tasks.
In October 2025, Microsoft announced the release of its in-house text-to-image model MAI-Image-1.