Microsoft's investment in AI does not change Bing's fate

A year or so ago, Microsoft invested some ten billion in OpenAI, the company that produces ChatGPT. And one of its first moves was to bring the chatbot on board Bing. An unstated goal: to try to nibble away at Google, the search engine that continues to dominate unchallenged on every platform.

Mission more or less failed, that of Microsoft, because judging by the data published by the portal Statcounter, Bing's usage has grown by barely one percentage point in the last 12 months, leaving the balance exactly as it was. Balances that see: Google in the lead, with over 90% of searches.

Yet, when Microsoft announced that it would include ChatGPT in its Bing search engine (this was in February 2022), many analysts judged this move as an 'iPhone moment', i.e. one capable of upsetting even the most established balances. Microsoft's CEO himself, Satya Nadella, imagined something like this: 'The entire search category is going through an epochal change. This opportunity presents itself very rarely,' he said.

After almost a year, however, nothing has changed. The new Bing, based on OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence technology, certainly amazed Internet users with conversational answers to naturally asked questions. But according to StatCounter, it ended 2023 with only 3.4 per cent of the global search market, up less than one percentage point from the day of the announcement.

In this story, it should be added that Google has also moved to revamp its very powerful engine. And in May it launched an experimental version called 'search generative experience' (SGE), which provides conversational answers on top of the familiar list of links. SGE is not yet available to everyone, but Google plans to integrate its latest artificial intelligence - Gemini - into this design, and to do so by 2024.