Briefly: Bing search engine has always been the biggest part of jokes, but thanks to the launch of its AI chatbot, Microsoft’s product may not be the source of laughter for much longer. According to the Redmond giant, Bing now has more than 100 million daily active users for the first time in its history.
It’s been a little over a month since Microsoft announced a new Bing engine that runs a version of the same AI behind ChatGPT. The updated version is able to provide more relevant results, summarize them from multiple sources, and improve answers, among many other things.
Thanks to the boost in numbers generated by the new chatbot, Bing has surpassed 100 million daily active users for the first time, a third of whom are new to Bing, writes Yusef Mahdi, Microsoft’s vice president of modern life, search, and devices.
“We see Bing’s new appeal as a validation of our view that search is due for reinvention and for the unique value proposition of combining search + answers + chat + compose into a single experience,” Mahdi wrote.
In addition to the daily excess users, Bing is seeing its engagement increase as more people perform daily searches. Microsoft says there are two factors responsible for this rise. The first is the growing number of people using Edge. Like Bing, the browser was mocked mercilessly long after launch, but that started to change when it switched to the Chromium-based version. Mehdi expects the new Bing and Edge AI features to bring more users to its browser.
The second factor is believed to be the introduction of the Prometheus AI model, which Mehdi says has improved the quality of Bing’s search results.
Bing’s chat AI has proven to be popular. About a third of the search engine’s daily preview users use chat daily. Microsoft sees approximately three conversations per session, with more than 45 million conversations since the preview began. Moreover, 15% of all Bing Chat sessions involve people using AI to create new content.
The new Bing Mobile app has also increased the search engine’s user numbers, with six times more daily active users than pre-launch levels.
Mehdi admits that Bing is still a small and low single-digit player in the search engine market. According to Statista, it has 8.85% of the global desktop market, compared to about 85% for Chrome. But the Microsoft exec says he still feels “good to be at the dance.” But will Google’s chatting AI, Bard, spoil the party when it arrives? It may depend on how well Google improves its performance; Bard gave inaccurate answers during its first demo last month.
