Microsoft Bing’s Brief History: The Steep Climb to Number One

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This post was sparked by conversations I had with @wakeupkitty and @golden-rain, on the topic of Microsoft's Bing's ability to create images with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. I originally wanted to write about this Bing AI Image Creator, but my literature search on Bing AI turned my attention to the history of Bing, which is currently the 2nd most popular search engine after Google. So, this article will be a “column” briefly summarizing the history of Microsoft's Bing. And this being practically my first tech-themed post in years, I was not even sure about tag composition to use. 😀

Its history goes back more than a decade, Bing was launched on June 3, 2009 (after being introduced by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009). As part of Microsoft and being a search engine, Bing's history can be traced back to 1998 when Microsoft Corporation launched MSN Search. In 2006, MSN Search became Windows Live Search. In 2007, the search engine was renamed Live Search. Bing was launched with a vision to provide improvements to user experience and search results.

Microsoft Bing wordmark logo since 2020. Source

Since its launch, Bing has undergone certain evaluations and developments, especially in its efforts to compete with Google's search engine domination and gain a larger market share, including a partnership with Yahoo! Search that began in October 2010. Since then, through the 10-year partnership, the Yahoo! Search search engine has been enhanced by Bing's search algorithms.

Early evolutions of Bing included improvement on its indexing capabilities. Also in 2010, Microsoft Corporation and Facebook (which at the time was the second most visited site after Google) reached an agreement where Facebook agreed to display Bing search results to searches conducted through its social platform.

The integration of social platform data such as Facebook and Twitter (now X) that occurred in 2012 promised a new experience for users, especially in more personalized search. In 2013, Bing showed an expansion of its capabilities when it introduced the Smart Search feature through Windows 8.1. With this feature, users can search across devices and platforms (app, web, desktop) simultaneously and relatedly.

Utilizing its product lineup to try and gain bigger market share in the global search engine market, in 2015 Microsoft made Bing the default search engine for Cortana (Microsoft's virtual assistant). Cortana is tightly integrated with Microsoft services, especially Microsoft Office. Perhaps Microsoft hopes that the user base of Microsoft products, especially Microsoft Office, will have a significant influence on the popularity of Bing.

Since around 2020, the world has seen massive developments in AI technology. Bing is not left behind and utilizes AI advancements in its search works. The latest and perhaps most significant development in Bing's utilization of AI technology is its integration with ChatGPT from OpenAI happening in 2023. This integration allows for more user-interactive and conversation-based searches, akin to a searcher talking to their robot friend to perform web searching tasks. The integration with AI also provides a more personalized search experience for users, and it can reach across platforms, considering that previously in 2012 Bing had started integrating users' social media data.

So how is Bing positioned in terms of market share, after all these efforts? Let's take a look at the following table and diagram of global search engine market share in February 2023 and February 2024 published by proceedinnovative.com.

Meanwhile, gs.statcounter.com summarized global search engine market share data in the period between December 2023 and December 2024 as shown in the following table and diagrams.

From these two data, it seems that Bing's road to rival Google is still very steep, although it can be seen that Google's market share has decreased by about 1.7% between February 2023 and February 2024, and Bing has increased by 0.5%.

This ends my article on the brief history of Microsoft’s Bing. Maybe later I will write about the Bing Image Creator. I'm still very curious about that one.

Readings

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bing
• https://www.britannica.com/money/Bing-search-engine
• https://www.bigbang-digital.com/en/a-brief-history-of-bing-search-engine/
• https://www.gramedia.com/literasi/search-engine-bing/
• https://www.brafton.com/glossary/microsoft-yahoo-alliance/
• https://www.searchenginejournal.com/bing-integrates-with-chatgpt/487638/
• https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-use-the-new-bing-with-chatgpt-and-what-you-can-do-with-it
• https://datadome.co/threat-research/about-new-bing-gpt-integration/
• https://www.proceedinnovative.com/blog/search-engine-market-share-2023-2024/
• https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share#monthly-202312-202412-bar

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