March 27, 2023
According to Bloomberg, Microsoft has informed two unnamed Bing-powered search engines that they will no longer be able to access its search data if they continue to use it with their AI tools.
While Microsoft licenses Bing’s search data to a number of search engines, including Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and AI search engine You.com, Microsoft appears to believe that using Bing’s search index as fodder for AI chatbots is a breach of contract, and it may choose to terminate its agreements with the search engines accused of misusing this information.
DuckDuckGo, You.com, and Neeva have all released AI tools, which may explain why Microsoft wants to restrict its own search data to Bing’s chatbot, especially since more companies, such as Google, have released their versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. The chatbot is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, the most powerful and up-to-date version of the company’s language model, and it can answer a variety of questions, generate code, write social media posts, and provide summaries.
Although DuckDuckGo uses a combination of Bing and its own web crawler to provide search results, You.com and Neeva also use Bing to supplement their results, saving time and resources spent crawling the entire web. It is still unclear which search engines are mentioned in Bloomberg’s report, and Microsoft has yet to respond to requests for comment.
Microsoft only said, “We’ve been in touch with partners who are out of compliance as we continue to consistently enforce our terms across the board. We’ll continue to work with them directly and provide any information needed to find a path forward.”
The sources for this piece include an article in TheVerge.
