After integrating ChatGPT for nearly a year, Bing’s market share increased by less than 1%

With the integration of ChatGPT, Microsoft's search engine Bing failed to soar. A year later, it is still looking at the back of Google and taking small steps in place. Bing will end 2023 with a global market share of 3.4%, up from 2.8% in February, according to data analytics firm StatCounter. In other words, after integrating ChatGPT for nearly a year, Bing’s market share increased by less than 1%.

At the end of November 2022, OpenAI quietly launched a chat robot ChatGPT. The number of users exceeded 1 million in the first week of its launch. Two months later, the number of monthly active users exceeded 100 million, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history at the time.

As an important "funder" of OpenAI, Microsoft quickly followed up and announced that it would integrate ChatGPT into its search engine Bing the month after ChatGPT was launched. In February 2023, just three months after ChatGPT went online, Microsoft officially announced the launch of the new Bing. Users can directly ask questions in natural language, and Bing will give answers. Between questions and answers, Microsoft outlines the vision of "the next generation of search methods".

The tone was high. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (Satya Nadella) showed his sword to Google and publicly stated: "Microsoft will use the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT to subvert the Internet search market and destroy the high profit margins that support Google's core business."

Google also responded to the challenge cooperatively. Its CEO Sundar Pichai issued a "red alert" internally, indicating that Google was facing an urgent and immediate crisis.

The exciting story begins: After dormant for more than ten years, Microsoft finally regained its search dream, transformed into an "Attack Microsoft" and impacted Google's dominance in this field.

But the reality is very skinny, Bing has barely been able to grab market share from Google. According to StatCounter, at the end of 2023, the global market share of Google search engine will still be stable at more than 90%.

On the one hand, as Google also launched Bard, a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT, other small engines have also integrated large language models, and the uniqueness of New Bing has been weakened.

On the other hand, search engine competition is much more than a competition of "who is better?" In October last year, Nadella testified in Google's antitrust case. He changed his previous rhetoric and accused Google of controlling the default search positions of mobile phone manufacturers and browsers. Even if Microsoft wanted to pay, it has not been able to succeed.

In fact, using "technological innovation" and "usage experience" as the entry points to attack Google is a script that Microsoft has already practiced when it officially launched Bing in 2009. Bing became the world's second largest search engine in one fell swoop, but it only shared less than 10% of the cake outside of Google. It has been "second" for more than ten years, and its market share has remained almost unchanged for more than ten years.

After all, ChatGPT cannot save Bing. In the field of search, Bing will have a hard time getting ahead unless it captures the king.

Bing's market share remains stuck.

According to StatCounter data, Bing's global market share will be 3.37% at the end of 2023. In fact, throughout 2023, Bing's market share experienced several months of decline after integrating ChatGPT, and then rebounded: the market share was 3.03% in January, fell below 3% from February to July, and began to slowly climb in August.

Google is almost the opposite. In 2023, the market share of Google search engine increased from January to May, reaching a maximum of 93.11%, and then fluctuated slightly to 91.62% at the end of the year.

Looking at the data from previous years, it is not difficult to find that such small market share fluctuations are within the normal range and cannot be linked to specific events. Bing's global market share growth in 2023 is even less than that of Russia's Yandex, whose share increased by 0.6% from the beginning of the year.

In other words, not only did Bing's market share only increase by less than 1%, but even this less than 1% was hardly related to the integration of GPT-4.

Microsoft has also released some "exciting" data. Once the new Bing was launched, it attracted 1 million users to apply to join within 48 hours. The month after the new Bing was launched, Microsoft announced that the number of daily active users of Bing exceeded 100 million, of which "several million active users" were attracted by the AI-integrated version. In the US market, Bing's market share increased from 6.67% at the beginning of the year to 7.71% at the end of the year.

But again, these numbers don't indicate that Bing has achieved any kind of success. Extending the time span, the "early adopters" brought about by technological innovation are fleeting and have not brought about qualitative changes; Bing's share of the US market has once exceeded 7% in the past three years, and this number has declined significantly compared to its peak US market share of 30% (including Yahoo).

The most obvious problem is that New Bing uses the integration of ChatGPT as its biggest selling point, but the uniqueness of this point is quickly weakened.

A few months after the birth of ChatGPT, Microsoft, which had already invested tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI, stole the show, while Google stood still and was questioned by the outside world as lagging behind in the AI ​​arms race. But in February 2023, Google released the Bard chatbot the day before Microsoft's conference, competing with ChatGPT and New Bing, before New Bing was officially released.

At the same time, other search engines have also deployed large language models: You.com launched the first-generation chat robot YouChat in December last year, before Microsoft's new Bing was launched; while DuckDuck followed the launch of new Bing and launched DuckAssist a few weeks later.

In addition, San Francisco has also launched PerplexityAI, which was established less than two years ago. The entire product provides a new search service based on a large language model, driven by OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model. It also has a built-in Copilot search function based on GPT-4, which users can use five times every four hours. Just in January this year, PerPlexityAI completed a Series B financing of US$73.6 million. Investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA and other companies. The post-financing valuation exceeded US$500 million.

When Bing aims at Google, the "oriole" is also thriving. For PerplexityAI alone, in the six months from March to October 2023, the number of search requests it processed per day increased 6 to 7 times, and the number of search requests it currently processes per day reaches millions.

On the other hand, the iteration of ChatGPT itself has further weakened the advantages of New Bing.The new Bing's appeal largely comes from "Internet-connected ChatGPT". At the time of its launch, ChatGPT was not yet connected to the Internet, and the training data was limited to 2021. But in September 2023, ChatGPT can already access the Internet and provide users with network links. OpenAI also launched a mobile application and installed a "mouth" and "eyes" for ChatGPT to achieve multi-modality.

Various changes have made it difficult for the new Bing to bring people the "freshness" when it was first launched, and ChatGPT failed to be Bing's savior.

To a certain extent, the current road must not have been traveled before.

Bing itself was born with this script in mind to challenge Google with technological innovation and better user experience. In 2008, then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer invited Lu Qi and promised him to fully develop the online search business and launch long-term competition with Google. Lu Qi once worked for Yahoo, responsible for Yahoo's search and search advertising technology. At that time, Yahoo could be said to be Google's only strong competitor.

The following year, Microsoft renamed LiveSearch Bing and positioned it as a "decision engine."In short, a lot of information is shown to users without having to search for it. For example, weather and flight information, when users type in keywords, relevant information will be displayed directly or pop-up windows will appear. For example, content from Facebook friends will also be recommended to users through Bing. To this end, Microsoft has cooperated with Facebook and multiple travel service providers.

The biggest move was the historic agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo, whereby Yahoo gradually gave up its own search technology and switched to Bing's data.

Actively cooperating with others and racking their brains to provide users with "intimate" services and a more "convenient" search experience. The path from the birth of Bing can be said to be exactly the same as the "New Bing".Even Google’s “vigilance” echoes the “red alert” that was sounded internally last year. In 2010, then-Google CEO Eric Schmit said that Google’s biggest enemy was not Apple or Facebook, but Microsoft Bing.

But Dali failed to produce miracles, and instead made Bing an embarrassing business for Microsoft. Two years after its launch, Microsoft lost $5.5 billion in its Bing search business. In 2014, when Nadella took office and became the CEO of Microsoft, he immediately needed to respond to the question of "whether Bing will be transferred." At that time, Bing was not yet profitable, and Yahoo had already considered stopping cooperation.

Ten years later, Microsoft is still holding on to its search business, but its global market share has been "stable" in single digits. Now we say that Bing's market share will be 3.71% at the end of 2023, an increase of less than 1% from the beginning of the year. In fact, Bing's market share at the beginning of 2010 was already 3.37%, and Bing is not much stronger than it was 14 years ago.

If the "decision engine" positioning more than ten years ago, the marriage with Yahoo, and today's "New Bing" integrating ChatGPT and joining forces with OpenAI cannot save Bing, then what can?

If Microsoft wants to carve out a niche in the search field, it may need to capture the king first.

In September last year, the U.S. Department of Justice opened an antitrust lawsuit against Google. The trial lasted for several weeks, and many competitors took the witness stand, including executives from small search engine companies such as DuckDuckGo and Neeva (which have since been shut down), as well as Microsoft CEO Nadella.

For example, the CEO of DuckDuckGo said that Google has reached agreements with browsers and platforms to make it the default search engine, hindering effective competition. Small search engine companies are suing Google for its monopoly in the search field. This is not surprising. What is interesting is thatMicrosoft also changed its rhetoric in court about "subverting search" and took a humble stance, describing how Bing's development was hindered in the shadow of Google.

Nadella revealed that Microsoft has invested approximately $100 billion in Bing. Nadella clearly has confidence in the Bing product itself, but he knows it's not enough.

According to Nadella's testimony in court, Google controls the two major systems at the entrance to the Internet-Android and Apple. For Android manufacturers, Google's Google Play is an important distribution platform. Using this as a bargaining chip, Google is firmly positioned as the default search engine for Android system browsers.

In the Apple ecosystem, Microsoft and Google have been at war for many years, but Google has had the upper hand in the past seven years. As early as 2013, Apple replaced Google with Bing in the iOS7 update, but in 2017, whether it is Siri and Spotlight on the mobile side or the desktop version, its default search engine is Google.

Nadella said that he is well aware that the Android system is locked by Google, so every year he will see if Bing has the opportunity to cooperate with Apple. Microsoft was even willing to accept years of losses just to get this deal. Becoming Apple's default search engine requires sharing advertising revenue with Apple, but Bing is smaller. In order to promote cooperation, Microsoft needs to give up a larger proportion of advertising revenue, and Microsoft is also ready to make such sacrifices.

But no matter how hard Microsoft tries and how much money it is willing to spend, Bing cannot replace Google as the default search engine in the Apple ecosystem.

Similarly, Microsoft also hit a wall when talking to Samsung about the issue of the browser's default search engine. Samsung Electronics executives said bluntly: "It's just not worth it. We don't want to go down this road."

In court, Nadella was a little helpless. He said that "Internet search is the biggest no-fly zone in (Silicon Valley)."

“The only way to change your habits is to change your default settings.”