Microsoft Cuts Off Access To Bing Search Data as It Shifts Focus To Chatbots

Microsoft quietly announced earlier this week that it plans to shut down a long-standing tool supplying search engine startups and other software developers with a raw feed of Bing search results. From a report: The Bing Search APIs, or application programming interfaces, were once vital to many niche Google alternatives, but fell out of favor more recently as Microsoft hiked fees for the service and restricted its use.

The shutoff, which is scheduled to begin on August 11, still came as a surprise to several developers who spoke with WIRED. Customers learned of it on Monday via an email from Microsoft and a post on its website. They were directed to consider using "Grounding with Bing Search as part of Azure AI Agents," a Microsoft service that allows chatbots like ChatGPT to augment AI-generated responses with "real-time public web data." Some developers view the AI-centric alternative as an insufficient replacement. Larger customers like DuckDuckGo told Wired they won't be affected.

How long until they shut off access to DuckDuckGo?

[pipatron]

"Larger customers like DuckDuckGo told Wired they won't be affected."

... for how long? While it is obviously a little ironic that DuckDuckGo routes the searches through Bing (and I was surprised the first time I read about it), it's still a sound idea and I'm glad DuckDuckGo can do it.

Or does DuckDuckGo pay dearly for the service, enough to compensate Microsoft's actual costs? Follow-up thought: If Microsoft no longer cares about Bing, will that cause DuckDuckGo to get worse over time?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

This is illegal in Germany,

Re:

[nicubunu]

Then good thing for them that DDG isn't a German company?

Re:

[TheWho79]

Bing runs about $7 per 25,000 searches. Which sounds like alot but when you consider 75% of a search engines queries are repetitive, a good caching algo that serves cached results can reduce that to more like $7 per 250,000 searches. Additionally DDG has it's own crawler that services (guess) 10-20% of it's daily top queries itself. Lastly, several of the top engines that use Bing, also supplement their results with Google scraping. Some grab 20-30k a day from Google (about 3k per ip). Again, that doesn't

Re:

[ChunderDownunder]

They'll just switch provoders to Alphabet and rebrand themselves DuckDuckGoogle.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

They'll just switch provoders to Alphabet and rebrand themselves DuckDuckGoogle.

DDG started as an anonymization front end to Google. Then Google didn't like it too much and they switched to Bing because Microsoft made them a deal.

I'm certain DDG has special arrangements with Microsoft because I bet DDG is a major source of Bing traffic.

See AI is popular if you force its use

[ebunga]

They bet the farm on AI and now have to force its use or they're doomed.

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[WaterFoodEarthCosmos]

Exactly on your title of the post ebunga. It also reminds me of this article: https://pluralistic.net/2025/0... [pluralistic.net]

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[stabiesoft]

thereg ran a great story about the EU setting up an open source db. Sounds like DDG and others might be able to tap into it. From the article.

"But there are efforts to foster truly independent search engines that don't piggy-back on the existing giants. One such project is the EU-backed OpenWebSearch initiative. Its web presence reflects that this is a research effort; it doesn't have anything to sell you, so there's no elevator pitch here, although its FAQ page is a bit more helpful."

Another jewel in the a

Re:

[stabiesoft]

Oops forgot to add, article is slightly wrong about setup. When you search for the browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh using engineAlias, if the option does not exist, you must add the full name of the option, not just engineAlias. I'd never used the aboutConfig that way and added just engineAlias the first time by accident.

All our is belong to us!

[thesjaakspoiler]

search engine start ups : they set us up the bo mb!

An awful prediction

[paul_engr]

Some day those of us unfortunate enough to be software-locked into Windows are gonna boot up to be greeted with a naked cortana prompt rather than the stupid windows lockscreen that you need to click and drag on

Re:

[Kitkoan]

>> naked cortana prompt

I swear, I didn't know my Windows computer would be NSFW.

This will ...

[PPH]

... create a huge market opening for Baidu and Yandex.