According to industry data, Microsoft’s share of the global web search market has barely changed since the arrival of Bing AI, aka Bing Chat aka Copilot. We’re told that Bing’s share has grown by just 0.56 percentage points since it plugged OpenAI’s GPT-4 into its web search nearly a year ago.
The latest data from StatCounter shows that while Microsoft has attracted some new users to Bing since the release of its conversational assistant, not many of them. Google is currently the big daddy of internet search.
Microsoft launched its OpenAI-powered Bing chatbot in February 2023 when it had a global search market share of 2.81% across all platforms. Fast forward to December, and even though it’s been growing a little each month, according to StatCounter, Bing only reached 3.37 percent.
The figures pale in comparison to rival Google, which had a 93.37 percent share of the global search market across all platforms in early 2023, though that had fallen to 91.62 percent by December. On desktop alone, Bing climbed slightly from 8.18 percent to 10.53 percent. Google dropped from 85.64 percent to 81.71 percent. On mobile, Bing is still below one percent for the full year, and Google has more than 95 percent of the global market.
It didn’t help that Microsoft limited the Bing chatbot to its Edge browser until the megacorp began opening it up to the likes of Chrome and Safari over the summer. Edge is teetering with just under five percent of the global browser market across all platforms, and nearly 12 percent on desktop. Microsoft also offers Bing Assistant through Android and iOS apps. We asked StatCounter to verify its market share figures for Bing, including the chatbot.
Bing AI, known today as Copilot after a brief rebrand as Bing Chat, tries to answer your questions using natural language, and summaries of pages and information, from the machine. May offer tailored content and other content. When it was released, Google was criticized for being slow to deploy rival Chatty Search Assistant. Under CEO Sundar Pichai, the ad company scrambled to grab its AI engineers to build its rival, Oracle Bard, and was taken public in March. It also tries to answer your questions and respond to requests in a conversational manner. Both Bing and Bard are known to hallucinate and make things up as all LLMs usually do.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s GPT-4-powered ChatGPT became the fastest-growing app in history in 2023, helped in part by a $10 billion investment from Microsoft.
“We saw a 10-fold increase in usage and it surprised us because if you think about it, DALL-E 2 was already pretty good,” said Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s VP of Search & A. I said today, leaving behind the state counter numbers. Referring to DALL-E 2, a popular image rendering bot created and launched by OpenAI before the advent of ChatGPT.
“It’s really made a difference in engagement and customers coming to our product.”
The bottom line: All these hyped-up AI capabilities have so far barely increased Microsoft’s share of the global search market. Aside from the edge barrier, it’s hard to go against Google because it pays billions to be the default search engine on people’s devices. But money isn’t always everything and the recent grumbling over the quality of Chocolate Factory’s search results could spell trouble for the supercorp.
Recent research shows that Google’s search quality is declining due to the increasing amount of SEO farms and affiliate link sites. The problem of low-quality content is only going to get worse with mass creative AI churning out stuff, and these weaknesses give competitors an opportunity to differentiate themselves and attract netizens.
Perplexity AI, a startup that recently raised $73.6 million from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos and others, is taking a shot at that. Self-described as an “answer engine”, it uses large language models to extract relevant information from websites to generate short answers to users’ questions. ®