In the search engine competition, the current Bing is a harmless kitten

In the search engine competition, the current Bing is a harmless kitten

San Francisco, 9/6/23

Microsoft launched the new AI-powered search engine Bing in February. The goal was clear: to steal a significant share of the search engine market from Google. However, as the latest figures from Statcounter show, Bing’s global market share was still around 3% in August, unchanged from January.

Analysis from Similarweb shows that Bing’s monthly visitors accounted for about 1% of Google’s visitors in both January and July. Bing’s US share was also at 6.47% in July, compared to over 7% in 2022.

Nevertheless: Microsoft considers the new Bing a success and questions external data because third-party companies do not take into account all users who access the Bing chat page directly. A Microsoft spokesman said Bing now has over 100 million daily active users and highlighted growth with access points such as Bing Chat new enterprise.

Users can consider themselves “winners”. Because Bing introduced generative AI attributes such as chatbots in competition with Google, Google integrated AI through its Search Generative Experience (SGE). Daniel Tunkelang, a search consultant with experience at Google and LinkedIn (now a subsidiary of Microsoft), finds the new Bing „cute, but not groundbreaking.“