Microsoft doesn’t want its rivals to use Bing’s search index to power their AI chatbots. according to a report by Bloomberg. The company has reportedly told two unnamed Bing-powered search engines that it will restrict their access to Microsoft’s search data altogether if they continue to use it with their AI tools.
As noted by Bloomberg, Microsoft licenses Bing’s search data to several search engines, including DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and the AI search engine You.com. While DuckDuckGo for example uses a combination of Bing and its own web crawler to provide search results, you.com And Neeva also pull some of their results from Bing, saving them some of the time and resources associated with searching the entire web.
However, Microsoft apparently draws the line in using Bing’s search index as fodder for AI chatbots. This is what sources close to the situation say Bloomberg that Microsoft believes that using Bing’s data in this way is against its contract, and that it may choose to terminate its agreements with the search engines accused of misusing this information.
“We’ve interacted with non-compliant partners while consistently enforcing our terms across the board,” Microsoft said. Bloomberg. “We will continue to work directly with them and provide all the information necessary to find a way forward.” It is unclear whether Microsoft has taken any action against search engines and the company has not immediately responded The edge‘s request for comment.
As more companies like Google roll out their take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, Microsoft is likely looking to make its own search data exclusive to Bing’s chatbot. Already powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, the latest and most powerful version of the company’s language model, the tool is capable of answering various questions, creating summaries, generating code, writing social media posts, and more.
