Microsoft Bing
Microsoft Bing, commonly referred to as Bing, is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. 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.
"Live Search" and "Live search" redirect here. For other uses, see Incremental search.
Type of site
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 (later renamed Microsoft Copilot), 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 2023, Bing holds the position of the second-largest search engine worldwide, commanding a query volume of 12%, trailing Google's 79%. Other competitors include Baidu with 5% and Yahoo! Search, which is largely powered by Bing, with 2%.
Software
Toolbars
The Bing Bar, a browser extension toolbar that replaced the MSN Toolbar, provides users with links to Bing and MSN content from within their web browser without needing to navigate away from a web page they are already on. The user can customize the theme and color scheme of the Bing Bar and choose which MSN content buttons to display. Bing Bar also has the local weather forecast and stock market positions.[73]
The Bing Bar integrates with the Bing search engine. It allows searches on other Bing services such as Images, Video, News and Maps. When users perform a search on a different search engine, the Bing Bar's search box automatically populates itself, allowing the user to view the results from Bing, should it be desired.
Bing Bar also links to Outlook.com, Skype and Facebook.[74]
Marketing
Debut
Bing's debut featured an $80 to $100 million online, TV, print, and radio advertising campaign in the US. The advertisements did not mention other search engine competitors, such as Google and Yahoo!, directly by name; rather, they tried to convince users to switch to Bing by focusing on Bing's search features and functionality.[82] The ads claimed that Bing does a better job countering "search overload".[83]
Before the launch of Bing, the market share of Microsoft web search pages (MSN and Live search) had been small. By January 2011, Experian Hitwise showed that Bing's market share had increased to 12.8% at the expense of Yahoo! and Google. In the same period, Comscore's "2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review" report showed that "Bing was the big gainer in year-over-year search activity, picking up 29% more searches in 2010 than it did in 2009".[84] The Wall Street Journal noted the jump in share "appeared to come at the expense of rival Google Inc".[85] In February 2011, Bing beat Yahoo! for the first time with 4.37% search share while Yahoo! received 3.93%.[86]
Counting core searches only, i.e., those where the user has an intent to interact with the search result, Bing had a market share of 14.54% in the second quarter of 2011 in the United States.[54][87][88][89]
The combined "Bing Powered" U.S. searches declined from 26.5% in 2011 to 25.9% in April 2012.[90] By November 2015, its market share had declined further to 20.9%.[91] As of October 2018, Bing was the third-largest search engine in the US, with a query volume of 4.58%, behind Google (77%) and Baidu (14.45%). Yahoo! Search, which Bing largely powers, has 2.63%.
UK advertising agencies in 2018 pointed to a study by a Microsoft Regional Sales Director suggesting the demographic of Bing users is older people (who are less likely to change the default browser of Windows), and that this audience is wealthier and more likely to respond to advertisements.[92]
To counter EU accusations that it was trying to establish a market monopoly, in September 2021 Google's lawyers claimed that one of the most commonly searched words on Microsoft Bing was Google, which is a strong indication that Google is superior to Bing.[93][94]
Search partners
In July 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.[95] All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners made the transition by early 2012.[15] The deal was altered in 2015, meaning Yahoo! was only required to use Bing for a "majority" of searches.[96]
DuckDuckGo has used multiple sources for its search engine, including Bing, since 2010.[97][98][99]
Ecosia uses Bing to provide its search results as of 2017.[100]
Bing was added into the list of search engines available in Opera browser from v10.6, but Google remained the default search engine.[101]
Mozilla Firefox made a deal with Microsoft to jointly release "Firefox with Bing",[102] an edition of Firefox using Bing instead of Google as the default search engine.[103][104] The standard edition of Firefox has Google as its default search engine, but has included Bing as an option since Firefox 4.0.[105]
In 2009 Microsoft paid Verizon Wireless US$550 million[106] to use Bing as the default search provider on Verizon's BlackBerry and have the others "turned off". Users could still access other search engines via the mobile browser.[107]
Live Search
Since 2006, Microsoft had conducted tie-ins and promotions to promote Microsoft's search offerings. These included:
Official website
Media related to Bing at Wikimedia Commons