Microsoft"s in-house search engine Bing has finally managed to cross 100 million daily active users, the company revealed on Wednesday. This comes almost a month after Microsoft introduced its AI-powered Bing Search integrated with the Edge browser to the public.
Bing first came into existence in June 2009 and since then it has lived a mostly unnoticed life, until recently. Despite the latest feat, Microsoft"s Yusuf Mehdi acknowledges that the search engine is still "a small, low, single digit share player" in the market. Yet the engagement from the millions of users who tried the new Bing preview has given it a much-needed boost.
Bing"s chat feature is powered by a newer version of OpenAI"s large language model and it can throw detailed answers to long and complex user queries. However, a party trick (other than playing chess) up its sleeve is the chatbot can even impersonate popular celebrities like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
Microsoft credits its Prometheus model for improving the Bing search quality and its core web search ranking. The Chromium-based Edge, which is Windows 10/11"s default browser, has also shown considerable growth in the last seven quarters, contributing to the trial and adoption of Microsoft"s search engine.
However, with less than 3% market share, according to StatCounter, Bing has a long road ahead before it steals a big bite of Google"s share which currently exceeds 90%. While its ChatGPT efforts did shake things up under Google"s roof, Microsoft itself is facing its own set of issues with the AI chatbot.