AI-powered chat helps Bing make a (small) dent in Google’s search hegemony

Microsoft’s Bing has by no means been in any hazard of overtaking Google because the Web’s hottest search engine. However the headline-grabbing AI-powered options from the “new Bing” preview that the corporate launched final month do appear to be serving to—Microsoft stated in the present day that Bing had handed the 100 million day by day energetic customers mark.

“We’re totally conscious we stay a small, low, single digit share participant,” writes Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi, driving residence simply how small Microsoft’s share of the search market is in comparison with Google’s. “That stated, it feels good to be on the dance!”

Google would not present day by day energetic consumer numbers for its search engine, however StatCounter information means that its marketshare usually hovers slightly below 90 % within the US, in comparison with 6 or 7 % for Bing.

Microsoft says that there are “hundreds of thousands of energetic customers” attempting out the AI-powered Bing preview and that roughly a 3rd of these are individuals who weren’t utilizing the service earlier than. The corporate additionally credit the slow-but-steady development of Microsoft Edge, which makes use of Bing as its default search engine and can repeatedly immediate you to change again to utilizing Bing as your default search engine when you change to one thing else.

Microsoft launched the Bing chatbot a month in the past in a “restricted preview,” utilizing a big language mannequin (LLM) from OpenAI. The corporate has made a lot of adjustments to the bot’s habits in response to its typically bizarre and threatening conversations. One change restricted the variety of responses the chatbot may give in a single occasion, because it was simpler for the bot to go off the rails throughout prolonged periods; extra just lately, Microsoft launched a lot of “personalities” for the bot to make solutions both extra simple or extra entertaining.

Since final month, Microsoft has added “new Bing” options to its Edge browser, Skype, the Home windows 11 taskbar, and a few of its developer instruments. The corporate can be testing “multimodal AI” expertise that may course of a number of types of enter, together with pictures, textual content, audio, and video.