When Microsoft merges ChatGPT’s Chatbot to Bing, it managed to achieve what the company has been trying to do for years: get people excited about its unpopular search engine. However, if not careful, Bing’s eagerness to capitalize on this rare win can do more harm than good.
EQUAL Bloomberg’s report (opens in a new tab)Microsoft has threatened search engines that use Bing indexing that they will revoke their licenses if they use Bing data in their own AI chatbots.
Indexing the entire internet so it can be searched is a very expensive endeavor, which is why smaller search engines like DuckDuckGo pay the companies behind the big search engines. such as Bing and Google, to use indexing for their own products.
It seems that while Microsoft is perfectly happy to monetize Bing’s indexing license to search engines, they don’t want it used in any rival chatbots. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft has warned at least two of its customers that using Bing’s index for their own AI chat engines violates the terms of their contracts, which could result in their loss. access to the index completely.
stifling competition
While it is entirely up to Microsoft to decide how to use the services and features it offers to its customers, this can also be seen as a competitive way to ensure Bing is unchallenged when it comes to AI. .
After Microsoft added AI to Bing, a bunch of search engines announced similar tools. DuckDuckGo has announced DuckAssistwhile You.com and Neeva, two relatively new search engines that rely on Bing’s indexing, have also announced AI-powered tools.
By claiming that these AI engines can’t use Bing indexing, Microsoft could have effectively killed them off. The threat of removing their access to its index is a big deal, as these search engines rely on them to return results. If they are cut, their entire product may become useless.
It’s a pity that a larger company bullies smaller ones to make sure they can’t compete, and it’s a pity to see that happen so early in the AI chat space. Emerging technologies like AI chatbots thrive when there are many competitors, as businesses innovate to help stand out from the crowd. OpenAI, the company that is the major language model GPT on which Bing’s chatbot is based, understands this, as it has made its platform open to developers. put it in your product.
It is therefore a pity that Microsoft does not seem to adopt the same approach (ironically, Microsoft has a close partnership with OpenAI), and by banning the use of Bing’s indexing, it could be severely hinder the development of AI-powered alternatives. search. That may be good for Microsoft and wish Bing to grow in popularity, but it’s bad news for the rest of us.
Of course, those little search engines can switch to another indexing source. The only problem is that there’s only one other company that indexes the entire internet for licensing: Google. With that search giant working on its own AI-powered search engine, Bard, it also doesn’t want to share access to its own index. I just hope the greed of Microsoft and other internet gatekeepers doesn’t kill off the potential of AI chatbots before they start working properly.
