Microsoft has announced that its Bing search engine has hit 100 million active users off the back of the introduction of its AI chatbot.
The company’s head of consumer marketing, Yusuf Mehdi, has issued a blog post celebrating the fact that the Bing search engine has passed the 100 million active user mark “after a number of years of steady progress”.
This headline figure comes off the back of Microsoft introducing its AI Bing Chat feature to Bing, which has proved hugely popular. The company claims that more than a million fresh users have come aboard in the month since Bing preview made Bing Chat available to try out.
Of course, that 100 million figure looks a whole lot less impressive when you stack it against the 1 billion users that Google can boast. “We are fully aware we remain a small, low, single digit share player,” Mehdi acknowledges. “That said, it feels good to be at the dance!”
Indeed, any form of progress in the asymmetrical web search war is potentially significant – especially as we appear to be on the cusp of the next phase, powered by AI rather than dumb algorithms and data harvesting.
One notable point mentioned here is that a third of the active users of the new Bing preview are completely new to Bing. In other words, a lot of people are being drawn over from rival search engines (likely Google) by Microsoft’s new AI chatbot.
Engagement with Bing is also up, with users conducting more searches daily.
Another factor behind this Bing growth is that Microsoft’s own Edge web browser is growing in popularity.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.