Microsoft said that it is dispensing with the waiting list which was in place for the last three months for its revamped Bing search engine. It will now allow anyone with a Microsoft account to use it. Microsoft revealed the new Bing search engine in February. It features a chatbot with the GPT-4 artificial intelligence model.
Google is currently the leader in search advertising. Microsoft wants to be a formidable challenger to Google after introducing the Bing search engine with help from OpenAI.
Microsoft has said, “For every percentage point of share gains in the highly profitable search category, revenue will increase by $2 billion.”
Divya Kumar, global head of marketing for search and AI at Microsoft, said, “We have the really good, positive signal from the time we launched.”
Microsoft is bulking up Bing’s search engine with more capabilities in addition to broadening access.
Microsoft is adding a way to get back to previous chat conversations, which ChatGPT has offered for months. It will provide a way to export chats to Microsoft Word documents. It also will start showing images and other media in chat messages when appropriate.
In due course of time, Bing will add integrations to third-party services such as OpenTable and Wolfram Alpha, enabling people to view and take action on current information when talking with the chatbot. OpenAI announced a similar concept called plug-ins for ChatGPT in March, but those wishing to try them must first join a waiting list.
Kumar said, “The Company will provide more details on how developers can build for the Bing chatbot at the Microsoft Build developer conference, which starts on May 23.”
Yusuf Mehdi, consumer marketing chief, wrote, “Microsoft’s Edge Web Browser has increased its share of the web browsing market every quarter for the past two years.”
Microsoft includes Edge in its Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems, and the default search engine in Edge is Bing.
Mehdi wrote, “Microsoft is updating Edge so that when people open a result that appears during a Bing chat, the chat will move to a sidebar in Edge in order to keep the conversation going.”
