Microsoft's Bing Market Share Barely Budged With ChatGPT Add-On (bloomberg.com) 48
When Microsoft announced it was baking ChatGPT into its Bing search engine last February, bullish analysts declared the move an "iPhone moment" that could upend the search market and chip away at Google's dominance. "The entire search category is now going through a sea change," Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said at the time. "That opportunity comes very few times." Almost a year later, the sea has yet to change. Bloomberg: The new Bing -- powered by OpenAI's generative AI technology -- dazzled internet users with conversational replies to queries asked in a natural way. But Microsoft's search engine ended 2023 with just 3.4% of the global search market, according to data analytics firm StatCounter, up less than 1 percentage point since the ChatGPT announcement.
Bing has long struggled for relevance and attracted more mockery than recognition over the years as a serious alternative to Google. Multiple rebrandings and redesigns since its 2009 debut did little to boost Bing's popularity. A month before Microsoft infused the search engine with generative AI, people were spending 33% less time using it than they had 12 months earlier, according to SensorTower. The ChatGPT reboot at least helped reverse those declines. In the second quarter of 2023, US monthly active users more than doubled year over year to 3.1 million, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence analysis of SensorTower mobile app data. Overall, users were spending 84% more time on the search engine, the data show. By year-end, Bing's monthly active users had increased steadily to 4.4 million, according to SensorTower.
Bing has long struggled for relevance and attracted more mockery than recognition over the years as a serious alternative to Google. Multiple rebrandings and redesigns since its 2009 debut did little to boost Bing's popularity. A month before Microsoft infused the search engine with generative AI, people were spending 33% less time using it than they had 12 months earlier, according to SensorTower. The ChatGPT reboot at least helped reverse those declines. In the second quarter of 2023, US monthly active users more than doubled year over year to 3.1 million, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence analysis of SensorTower mobile app data. Overall, users were spending 84% more time on the search engine, the data show. By year-end, Bing's monthly active users had increased steadily to 4.4 million, according to SensorTower.
ChatGPT was as good as it was because no one knew (Score:3, Insightful)
about it. Now there are likely millions of people trying to game responses the same as SEO. It will feed on itself as well, since it scrapes from the internet and will likely find its own responses.
There are already very controversial answers to very straightforward questions. I played with ChatGPT very briefly, it could be somewhat useful for certain limited uses, but I think the utility is dropping fast.
Ask it a question about, say, authoritarian dictatorships such as China and it will give you pro-CCP defense talking points. It's already being fucked with.
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Put forth something that looks good, release a bunch of statements with current buzzwords, and let peoples ignorance do the walking for you.
The biggest issue is Microsoft itself (Score:3, Insightful)
They are too worried about everything.
Bing's in the beginning uncensored chatgpt was amazing. Then it quickly got lobotimized severely.
In the end it would basically flag you for just about anything you asked for, you didn't have to use bad words or anything, it would just straight out refuse results, deny your results because "bad this and that", and it would be laughable in the end.
So Microsoft just being their usual self, nothing to see here, move along.
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This. I have done multiple completely innocuous questions for Bing, presumably because they used a very crude keyword filter on their system. In the end I just close it and fire up the ChatGPT app on my phone instead.
Their internal environment would explain it well (Score:2)
Everything is sanitized. They lack a soul and just go wherever the sales team thinks the filthy lucre is next.
If Bing is so good... (Score:2)
Edge (Score:2)
my gaming laptop is Windows 11 Home. Every time I re-open Edge it tries to set itself as the default browser. It does not do this on my work issued Windows 11 Enterprise laptop.
Mickeysoft recently overtook Apple as the most valuable company on earth. All both of them do is rent seek and try to lock you in to their ecosystems. Anti-trust is dead.
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Good catch. I meant to say... "I am not interested in having Bing as my primary search engine." Thanks for the correction.
Face it (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody outside of board rooms gives a fuck about AI. Everyone but the CEOs of the world know it's rubbish, but shhh, such dot.com moments when you can fleece them back don't happen every decade.
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Indeed. Well, there may be some niche applications. I found it to be somewhat helpful in being dishonest. Ask "How do I say [bad thing] in a positive way". But that is the extend of it. Of negative worth for other things, because you cannot trust the results.
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I find Claude2 useful for looking up command syntax when I'm swapping between different switch OSs. It is like having a friend who's an expert in that CLI who you can just ask "How do I change the management port VLAN" or whatever on a given switch model.
I find GPT4 useful a bit with it's DALLE plugin for quick illustrations.
Hilariously I find them most useful for speeding up my DMing in D&D - here's an image of what stuff looks like for players off the cuff, or here's a leveled NPC off the cuff. Probab
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anything that makes Word's autocomplete or Excel's error detection better
Both were immensely improved with the invention of the "turn off" button.
So THAT explains it! (Score:2, Insightful)
I rarely use Bing to search because the results have been so poor. Now, I know why... It has been "helping" by applying "AI" to answer queries where I only wanted sites that matched the search terms. "This is what you REALLY searched for!"
Have to guess that's why Google results have deteriorated so far recently, as they bring their AI-ASSisted search online.
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Who needs AI when we could redirect the combined brain power of SEO to real problems.
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"Are going to"? Where have you been? It's basically impossible to find decent reviews of any product, or this service vs that service for the last 3 years at least. Is Going.com a useful service? How does it compare to Mighty Travels Premium? Who knows?! I guess I'll need to pay for both and compare, or just keep using traditional flight searches and hope for the best.
Every product search is just endless "best product of 2023" lists that are junk. What's a good laser cutter? 12 best of 2024 is already out a
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Just imagine what awesome products we could have if we pumped the money that's wasted on marketing into R&D!
Surprised it's that high (Score:1)
Nobody uses Bing willingly that's why Microsoft have to resort to all sorts of anti-trust tricks abusing their desktop software just to get people to visit it (much like msn.com) defrauding their advertisers in the process, and when they do this people just close the tab and move on, after all who would want to use a malware/scam infested garbage search engine run by deviant try-hards, infusing it with generative plagiarised IP which Microsoft seem to think is AI is more of an annoyance than a help (you can
I use Bing! (Score:4, Interesting)
Ironically enough... (Score:1)
Why would market share change? (Score:2)
Assuming you were actually interested in AI chatbots, why would you start using Bing for anything other than a cursory query? Firstly better chatbots exist, and secondly every search engine and it's webcrawler are implementing AI now as well, so there's little reason for people to jump ship.
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Since when do share values have to do anything with reality? It is noteworthy because usually the MBA types think that AI is the next big thing, so that the share value didn't budge is actually curious, since the intended effect was that the goofballs trading in shares should believe that it has a huge impact.
Seems they're finally catching on that we've been bullshitting them again. Oh well, it was a nice dot.com 2.0 while it lasted.
Advertisement Engine? (Score:1)
How does Bloomberg believe to know which advertisement engine I'm using?
I'm probably a false negative and a false positive, I neither use bing nor google.
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Then you're a market share nobody cares about.
Which isn't the worst position to be in, to be honest...
People don't have any need to use AI (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of what people want to do with AI is create funny pictures. For any real tasks it doesn't hold up because of hallucinations, and people already know about existing resources that are helpful to accomplish what they want.
AI is not helping the average user and is not a killer app. It's more of a toy. For businesses it's precarious and unreliable.
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I find AI *can* be a great search, say for a question like "how do I change the management VLAN on a juniper ex4300". I used to have (for Blade switches pre us using Juniper) 3 PDFs I'd need to cross reference when we got a new model, and write up lots of docs for our specific use case. I still need docs, but for one off things I can usually get the right answer from AI without spending 30 minutes searching for the correct manual and then searching the PDF for the syntax, or searching Juniper's site and fig
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Yep, pretty much. That unreliability gives it an overall negative worth. Not that this is new. "Hallucinations" about 10 years ago is why IBM stopped trying to use Watson in the medical field.
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Anonymous (Score:3)
I have never used chatbot because:
- generally I have better things to do than chat with a bot
- they want me to login with my phone?
Sorry, I have enough data being collected on me already.
Allow me to use it anonymously and I just *might* spend a
Minute or two.
The money would have been better spent on improving search results.
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And that's the real problem with AI: It's a curiosity, nothing people really want to use.
Recently, they added copilot at work. It was the rage for a day and people sent each other their "awesome" results. The whole hype lasted almost 'til lunch.
Register Wall (Score:2)
You have to register to use most of MS's AI. If they want more eyeballs, tear down the damned register wall.
Ask ChatGPT for a new name. (Score:2)
Because Bing is still as awful today as it was when they announced it.
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This. When I think of Bing my mind instantly goes to Chandler saying, "well you should meet my uncle Bada". Bing is the absolute dumbest name for a search engine. They might as well should have named it Poof.
Customer support chat bots still suck (Score:2)
When I search (Score:2)
I expect to get back a list of links to the roughly relevant sources, and not some algorithm's word salad from the first 100 hits.
Wrong Comparison (Score:2)
Why would I use Bing when I can go straight to ChatGPT
When I need to search the web I use google, when I need to use ChatGPT I use that.
Google Search AI (Score:2)
Well, at about the same time, Google started adding in an AI result at the top of its search results. Usually I ignore it, but I've been surprised with technical searches at just how often it gives me what I'm looking for without having to click on anything else.
Search is a fairly sticky business. Most people won't switch no matter what you do unless it's really bad. Adding "we have AI" might get a few people to check it out, but now Google has that, too, so for most people, it's a wash. If you consiste
Lots of comments about AI here.... (Score:2)
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It's mostly based on observation.
The older geeks here have seen this before. About a quarter century ago. We called it "dot.com". Everyone and their dog jumped onto this new thing called "the internet" and every company needed to be on it. You had an idea for a startup, you yelled "TCP!" into a bank and the question "how many millions do you need?" was the response. It was the "everyone will have a company on the internet in 5 years" time.
Well, guess what, it wasn't. Yes, a few companies finally emerged whe
Misunderstanding how ChatGPT is integrated (Score:2)
Microsoft didn't integrate ChatGPT (or any LLM) into Bing Search. That product is still what it's always been, lame.
What they DID do was add a Bing Chat tab that shows up when you go to the Bing site. This is a completely separate Q&A app built on ChatGPT's LLM. It works great, and I use it a lot. But I still don't use Bing, because it's as lame as it's always been.
So there's very little reason to expect that Bing market share would increase, because people are flocking to the AI page.
Edge/Windows 11? (Score:2)
I wonder how much of this 1% gain should be attributed to migration to Win11 with Edge as the default browser (with Bing as default Search Engine,) over the same time period? My guess is those account for most of the gains, not ChatGPT integration.
Don't use Bing but ... (Score:1)
Generative AI is good at generating code blocks, press releases, product descriptions, etc. Which is very different than indexing/cataloging -- which is what searching does.
I don't see how generative AI can enhance search results.