No 'iPhone moment'! Microsoft Bing Search Engine Market Share Barely Budged With ChatGPT Add-On
When Microsoft Corp. announced it was baking ChatGPT into its Bing search engine last February, bullish analysts declared the move an “iPhone moment” that could upend the search market and chip away at Google's dominance.
“The entire search category is now going through a sea change,” Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said at the time. “That opportunity comes very few times.”
Almost a year later, the sea has yet to change.
The new Bing — powered by OpenAI's generative AI technology — dazzled internet users with conversational replies to queries asked in a natural way. But te, according to data analytics firm StatCounter, up less than 1 percentage point since the ChatGPT announcement.
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Bing has long struggled for relevance and attracted more mockery than recognition over the years as a serious alternative to Google. Multiple rebrandings and redesigns since its 2009 debut did little to boost Bing's popularity. A month before Microsoft infused the search engine with generative AI, people were spending 33% less time using it than they had 12 months earlier, according to SensorTower.
The ChatGPT reboot at least helped reverse those declines. In the second quarter of 2023, US monthly active users more than doubled year over year to 3.1 million, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence analysis of SensorTower mobile app data. Overall, users were spending 84% more time on the search engine, the data show. By year-end, Bing's monthly active users had increased steadily to 4.4 million, according to SensorTower.
To build on the momentum, Microsoft has been adding more AI tools to Bing. In October, the company integrated the latest version of OpenAI's image-generating model, DALL-E 3. Visitors can use it to create realistic-looking images with simple text prompts.
The offering does nothing to enhance Bing's search abilities. But its addition generated a spike in usage, according to Jordi Ribas, Microsoft's corporate vice president of search and
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