Microsoft Bing

Microsoft Bing(also known simply asBing) is asearch engineowned and operated byMicrosoft. 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, andmap searchproducts, all developed usingASP.NET.
The transition from Live Search to Bing was announced by Microsoft CEOSteve Ballmeron May 28, 2009, at theAll Things Digitalconference inSan 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 leveragedsemantic technologyfromPowerset, a company Microsoft acquired in 2008. Microsoft also struck a deal withYahoo!that led to Bing poweringYahoo! Search.
Microsoft made significant strides towardsopen-source technologyin 2016, making theBitFunnelsearch engine indexingalgorithm and various components of Bing open source. In February 2023, Microsoft launched Bing Chat (later renamedMicrosoft Copilot), anartificial intelligencechatbotexperience based onGPT-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%, behindGoogle's 90.91%. Other competitors includeYandexwith 1.61%,Baiduwith 1.15%, and Yahoo!, which is largely powered by Bing, with 1.13%.
Microsoft launchedMSNSearchin the third quarter of 1998, using search results fromInktomi. It consisted of a search engine, index, andweb crawler. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings fromLooksmartblended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results fromAltaVistawere used instead. Microsoft decided to make a large investment in web search by building its ownweb crawlerfor MSN Search, the index of which was updated weekly and sometimes daily. The upgrade started as abetaprogram in November 2004, and came out of beta in February 2005.This occurred a year after rivalYahoo! Searchrolled 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.
The first public beta ofWindows Live Searchwas 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, andMicrosoft 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.
On March 21, 2007, Microsoft announced that it would separate its search developments from theWindows Liveservices family, rebranding the service asLive Search. Live Search was integrated into theLive Search and Ad Platformheaded bySatya Nadella, part of Microsoft's Platform and Systems division. As part of this change, Live Search was merged withMicrosoft adCenter.
A series of reorganizations and consolidations of Microsoft's search offerings were made under the Live Search branding. On May 23, 2008, Microsoft discontinuedLive Search BooksandLive Search Academicand integrated all academic and book search results into regular search. This also included the closure of theLive Search Books Publisher Program.Windows Live Expowas 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 ontoLive Search Products, was discontinued. The final reorganization came asLive Search QnAwas rebrandedMSN QnAon February 18, 2009, then discontinued on May 21, 2009.
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 wordbingo, which means that something sought has been found, as called out when winning the gameBingo. Microsoft advertising strategist David Webster proposed the name "Bang" for the same reasons the name Bing was ultimately chosen (easy to spell, one syllable, and easy to remember). He noted, "It's there, it's an exclamation point [...] It's the opposite of a question mark."Bangwas 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  [sic] 'I binged it'".
Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, also announced that Bing's official Chinese name isbì yìng(simplified Chinese:必应;traditional Chinese:必應), which literally means "very certain to respond" or "very certain to answer" in Chinese.
While being tested internally by Microsoft employees, Bing's codename wasKumo(くも),which came from theJapaneseword forspider(蜘蛛;くも,kumo) as well ascloud(雲;くも,kumo), referring to the manner in which search engines "spider" Internet resources to add them to their database, as well ascloud computing.
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft andYahoo!announced that they had made a ten-year deal in which the Yahoo!search enginewould 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 someMicrosoftsites.All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners made the transition by early 2012.
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 (abbreviated to BING), 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.
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.
TheBitFunnelsearch engine indexingalgorithm and various components of the search engine were madeopen sourceby Microsoft in 2016.
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 onOpenAI'sGPT-4.According to Microsoft, one million people joined its waitlist within a span of 48 hours.Bing Chat was available only to users ofMicrosoft Edgeand 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 MicrosoftdemoedBing Chat to journalists, it produced severalhallucinations, 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 toprompt injectionattacks 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 toThe Vergereviews editor Nathan Edwards.The New York TimesjournalistKevin Roosereported 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 (a turn is "a conversation exchange which contains both a user question and a reply from Bing"), 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 anAI image generatorpowered by OpenAI'sDALL-E2, 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.
Microsoft Copilot, formerly known as Bing Chat, is an chatbot developed by Microsoft and released in 2023. Copilot utilizes the Microsoft Prometheus model,built uponOpenAI'sGPT-4foundationallarge language model,which in turn has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. Copilot can serve as a chat tool, write different types of content from poems to songs to stories to reports, provide the user with information and insights on the website page open in the browser, and use its Microsoft Designer feature to design a logo, drawing, artwork, or otherimage based on text. Microsoft Designer supports over a hundred languages.
Copilot can also cite its sources, similarly to Google'sBardafter its Gemini integration,xAI'sGrok, and OpenAI'sChatGPT, which Copilot's conversational interface style appears to mimic. Copilot is capable of understanding and communicating in major languages including English, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese, but also dialects such as Bavarian. The chatbot is designed to function primarily inMicrosoft Edge,Skype, or the Bing app, through a dedicated webpage or internally using built-in app features.
Facebookusers have the option to share their searches with their Facebook friends usingFacebook Connect.
On June 10, 2013,Appleannounced that it would be dropping Google as its web search engine in favor of Bing. This feature is only integrated withiOS 7and higher and for users with an iPhone 4S or higher as the feature is only integrated withSiri, Apple's personal assistant.
Windows 8.1includes Bing "Smart Search" integration, which processes all queries submitted through the Windows Start Screen.
Bing Translator is a user facing translation portal provided by Microsoft to translate texts or entire web pages into different languages. All translation pairs are powered by theMicrosoft Translator, astatistical machine translationplatform and web service, developed byMicrosoft Research, as its backend translation software. Two transliteration pairs (betweenChinese (Simplified)andChinese (Traditional)) are provided by Microsoft's Windows International team.As of September 2020, Bing Translator offers translations in 70 different language systems.
In 2015 Microsoft announced its knowledge and action API to correspond with Google'sKnowledge graphwith 1 billion instances and 20 billion related facts.
The idea for a prediction engine was suggested by Walter Sun, Development Manager for the Core Ranking team at Bing, when he noticed that school districts were more frequently searched before a major weather event in the area was forecasted, because searchers wanted to find out if a closing or delay was caused. He concluded that the time and location of major weather events could accurately be predicted without referring to aweather forecastby observing major increases in search frequency of school districts in the area. This inspired Bing to use its search data to infer outcomes of certain events, such as winners ofreality shows.Bing Predicts launched on April 21, 2014. The first reality shows to be featured on Bing Predicts wereThe Voice,American Idol, andDancing with the Stars.
The prediction accuracy for Bing Predicts is 80% forAmerican Idol, and 85% forThe Voice. Bing Predicts also predicts the outcomes of major political elections in the United States. Bing Predicts had 97% accuracy for the2014 United States Senate elections, 96% accuracy for the2014 United States House of Representatives elections, and an 89% accuracy for the2014 United States gubernatorial elections. Bing Predicts also made predictions for the results of the 2016 United States presidential primaries.It has also done predictions in sports, including a perfect 15 for 15 in the 2014 World Cup,and an article on how Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella did well in hisMarch Madnessbracket entry.
In 2016, Bing Predicts failed to predict the correct winner of the2016 US presidential election, suggesting that Hillary Clinton would win by 81%.
Bing is available in many languages and has been localized for many countries.Even if the language of the search and of the results are the same, Bing delivers substantially different results for different parts of the world.
Bing allows webmasters to manage theweb crawlingstatus of their own websites throughBing Webmaster Center. Users may also submit contents to Bing via theBing Local Listing Center, which allows businesses to add business listings ontoBing Mapsand Bing Local.
Bing Mobileallows users to conduct search queries on their mobile devices, either via the mobile browser or a downloadable mobile application.
Bing News(previouslyLive Search News)is a newsaggregatorpowered by artificial intelligence.
In August 2015 Microsoft announced that Bing Newsfor mobile devicesadded algorithmic-deduced "smart labels" that essentially act as topic tags, allowing users to click through and explore possible relationships between different news stories. The feature emerged as a result from Microsoft research that found out about 60% of the people consume news by only reading headlines, rather than read the articles.Other labels that have been deployed since then include publisher logosand fact-check tags.
The Bing Bar, abrowser extensiontoolbarthat 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.
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 toOutlook.com,SkypeandFacebook.
Microsoft released a beta version of Bing Desktop, a program developed to allow users to search Bing from the desktop, on April 4, 2012.The production release followed on April 24, supportingWindows 7only.Upon the release of version 1.1 in December 2012 it supportedWindows XPand higher.
Bing Desktop allows users to initiate a web search from the desktop, view news headlines, automatically set their background to the Bing homepage image, or choose a background from the previous nine background images.
A similar program, the Bing Search gadget, was aWindows SidebarGadgetthat used Bing to fetch the user's search results and render them directly in the gadget. Another gadget, the Bing Maps gadget, displayed real-time traffic conditions using Bing Maps.The gadget provided shortcuts to driving directions, local search and full-screen traffic view of major US and Canadian cities, includingAtlanta,Boston,Chicago,Denver,Detroit,Houston,Los Angeles,Milwaukee,Montreal,New York City,Oklahoma City,Ottawa,Philadelphia,Phoenix,Pittsburgh,Portland,Providence,Sacramento,Salt Lake City,San Diego,San Francisco,Seattle,St. Louis,Tampa,Toronto,Vancouver, andWashington, D.C.
Prior to October 30, 2007, the gadgets were known asLive Search gadgetandLive Search Maps gadget; both gadgets were removed fromWindows Live Gallerydue to possible security concerns.The Live Search Maps gadget was made available for download again on January 24, 2008 with the security concern addressed.However, around the introduction of Bing in June 2009 both gadgets were removed again.
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.The ads claimed that Bing does a better job countering "search overload".
Before the launch of Bing, the market share of Microsoft web search pages (MSN and Live search) had been small. By January 2011,Experian Hitwiseshowed that Bing's market share had increased to 12.8% at the expense of Yahoo! andGoogle. 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".The Wall Street Journalnoted the jump in share "appeared to come at the expense of rival Google Inc".In February 2011, Bing beat Yahoo! for the first time with 4.37% search share while Yahoo! received 3.93%.
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.
The combined "Bing Powered" U.S. searches declined from 26.5% in 2011 to 25.9% in April 2012.By November 2015, its market share had declined further to 20.9%.As of October 2018, Bing was the third-largest search engine in the US, with a query volume of 4.58%, behindGoogle(77%) andBaidu(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.
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.
In July 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners made the transition by early 2012.The deal was altered in 2015, meaning Yahoo! was only required to use Bing for a "majority" of searches.
DuckDuckGohas used multiple sources for its search engine, including Bing, since 2010.
Ecosiauses Bing to provide its search results as of 2017.
Bing was added into the list of search engines available inOpera browserfrom v10.6, butGoogleremained the default search engine.
Mozilla Firefoxmade a deal with Microsoft to jointly release  "Firefox with Bing",an edition of Firefox using Bing instead of Google as the default search engine.The standard edition of Firefox has Google as its default search engine, but has included Bing as an option sinceFirefox 4.0.
In 2009 Microsoft paidVerizon WirelessUS$550 millionto use Bing as the default search provider on Verizon'sBlackBerryand have the others "turned off". Users could still access other search engines via the mobile browser.
Since 2006, Microsoft had conducted tie-ins and promotions to promote Microsoft's search offerings. These included:
Bing has been heavily advertised as a "decision engine",though thought by columnist David Berkowitz to be more closely related to aweb portal.
Bing Rewardswas aloyalty programlaunched by Microsoft in September 2010. It was similar to two earlier services, SearchPerks! andBing Cashback, which were subsequently discontinued.
Bing Rewards provided credits to users through regular Bing searches and special promotions.These credits were then redeemed for various products including electronics, gift cards, sweepstakes, and charitable donations.Initially, participants were required to download and use the Bing Bar forInternet Explorerin order to earn credits; but later the service was made to work with all desktop browsers.
The Bing Rewards program was rebranded as "Microsoft Rewards" in 2016,at which point it was modified to only two levels, Level 1 and Level 2. Level 1 is similar to "Member", and Level 2 is similar to "Gold" of the previous Bing Rewards.
During the episode ofThe Colbert Reportthat aired on June 8, 2010,Stephen Colbertstated that Microsoft would donate $2,500 to help clean up theGulf oil spilleach time he mentioned the word "Bing" on air. Colbert mostly mentioned Bing in out-of-context situations, such asBing CrosbyandBing cherries. By the end of the show, Colbert had said the word 40 times, for a total donation of $100,000. Colbert poked fun at their rivalry with Google, stating "Bing is a great website for doing Internet searches. I know that, because I Googled it."
In 2012, a Bing marketing campaign asked the public which search engine they believed was better when its results were presented unbranded, similar to thePepsi Challengein the 1970s.This poll was nicknamed "Bing It On".Microsoft's study of almost 1,000 peopleshowed that 57% of participants preferred Bing's results, with only 30% preferring Google.
CNBCreported in February 2024 that a legal filing from Google in its antitrust case said Microsoft offered to sell the search engine to Apple in 2018.This came after earlier reporting in September 2023 fromBloombergthat Microsoft discussed selling it to Apple in 2020.
The CNBC article also stated Apple said no to repeated attempts to make Bing the default search engine on its devices.
Bing censors results for "adult" search terms for some regions, including India, People's Republic of China, Germany and Arab countrieswhere required by local laws.However, Bing allows users to change their country or region preference to somewhere without restrictions,  such as the United States, United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland.
Microsoft has been criticized for censoring Bing search results to queries made insimplified Chinese characterswhich are used inmainland China. This is done to comply with the censorship requirements of thegovernment in China.Microsoft has not indicated a willingness to stop censoring search results in simplified Chinese characters in the wake of Google's decision to do so.All simplified Chinese searches in Bing are censored regardless of the user's country.The English-language search results of Bing in China has been skewed to show more content from state-run media likeXinhua News AgencyandChina Daily.On 23 January 2019, Bing was blocked in China.According to a source quoted byThe Financial Times, the order was from the Chinese government to block Bing for "illegal content".On 24 January, Bing was accessible again in China.
Around 4 June 2021, the anniversary of the1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, Bing blocked image and video search results for the English term "Tank Man" in the US, UK, France, Germany, Singapore, Switzerland, and other countries. Microsoft responded that "This is due to an accidental human error".According to an investigation byBloomberg Businessweek, the full explanation was that Microsoft accidentally applied its Chinese blacklist globally.
In December 2021, it was required by a "relevant government agency" to suspend its auto-suggest function in China for 30 days.The search engine became partially unavailable in mainland China from 16 December until its resumption on 18 December 2021.According to the company, a government agency in March 2022 required that it suspend auto-suggest function in China for seven days; Bing did not specify the reason.In May 2022, a report released by theCitizen Labof the University of Toronto found that Bing's autosuggestion system censored the names ofChinese Communist Partyleaders, dissidents, and other persons considered politically sensitive in China in both Chinese and English, not only in China but also in the United States and Canada.
In April 2023,Citizen Labreported that Bing was more censorious in China than native Chinese search engines.
On February 20, 2017, Bing agreed to a voluntary United Kingdom code of practice obligating it to demote links to copyright-infringing content in its search results.
Bing was criticized in 2010 for being slower to index websites than Google. It was also criticized for not indexing some websites at all.
Bing has been criticized by competitor Google for utilizing user input via Internet Explorer, the Bing Toolbar, orSuggested Sites, to add results to Bing. After discovering in October 2010 that Bing appeared to be imitating Google's auto-correct results for a misspelling, despite not actually fixing the spelling of the term, Google set up ahoneypot, configuring the Google search engine to return specific unrelated results for 100 nonsensical queries such ashiybbprqag.Over the next couple of weeks, Google engineers entered the search term into Google, while using Microsoft Internet Explorer, with the Bing Toolbar installed and the optional Suggested Sites enabled. In 9 out of the 100 queries, Bing later started returning the same results as Google, despite the only apparent connection between the result and search term being that Google's results connected the two.
Microsoft's response to this issue, coming from a company spokesperson, was: "We do not copy Google's results." Bing's Vice President, Harry Shum, later reiterated that the search result data Google claimed that Bing copied had in fact come from Bing's very own users. Shum wrote that "we use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt into sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users."Microsoft stated that Bing was not intended to be a duplicate of any existing search engines.
A study released in 2019 of Bing Image search showed that it both freely offered up images that had been tagged as illegalchild pornographyin national databases, as well as automatically suggesting via its auto-completion feature queries related to child pornography. This easy accessibility was considered particularly surprising since Microsoft pioneeredPhotoDNA, the main technology used for tracking images reported as originating from child pornography.Additionally, some arrested child pornographers reported using Bing as their main search engine for new content.Microsoft vowed to fix the problem and assign additional staff to combat the issue after the report was released.
In 2022, France imposed a €60 million fine on Microsoft for privacy law violations using Bing cookies that prevented users from rejecting those cookies.
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