Bing's Success: How It Reached 100 Million Daily Users

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has long been the butt of jokes and is considered the underdog in the search engine market dominated by Google.

However, in recent months, Bing’s numbers seem to be changing. On February 7, 2023, Microsoft announced that Bing had crossed the milestone of 100 million active users a month on a daily-basis after the launch of its chatbot artificial intelligence.

Bing’s success was caused by introducing its chatbot AI, powered by a version of the same AI behind CHatGPT, which has allowed it to provide relevant results, summarize them from multiple sources, and refine answers. Microsoft’s Vice President for Modern Life, Search, and devices state that the new chatbot has brought in one-third of the 100 million daily active users, many of whom are new to Bing. This is a validation of Microsoft’s view that search is due for reinvention and the unique value proposition of combining search, answers, chat, and creation in one experience.

Bing’s engagement is also increasing as more people conduct daily searches. Microsoft attributes this uptick to two factors:

The first factor is the increasing number of people using Edge, Microsoft’s browser. It is expected that the new Bing and Edge AI features will bring in more users.
The second factor is the introduction of the Prometheus AI model, which has improved the quality of Bing’s search results.

Bing’s Chat Performing High Numbers

Bing’s chat AI has proven to be particularly popular, with around one-third of the search engine’s daily preview users using Chat on a daily-basis. Microsoft is seeing three chats per session, with 45 million chats in total taking place since it has begun. Moreover, 15% of all Bing Chat sessions include people that are using Artificial Intelligence to generate ideas.

The New Bing mobile app has increased the search engine’s user numbers, with 6 more daily active users compared to pre-launch levels according to Microsoft. The app has an intuitive interface, and its AI capabilities provide users with more personalized and relevant search results.

Considering that Bing is still a small player in the search engine market, its recent success has been more than impressive, with an 8.85% share of the global desktop market compared to Chrome’s nearly 85%, according to Statista. Despite its small market share, Bing’s growth trajectory at the moment is promising, and it is clear that Microsoft is showing commitment to developing and improving the search engine.

Google’s own chat AI (Bard), which is set to launch soon, may impact Bing’s numbers. However, the performance of Bard remains to be seen as it gave inaccurate answers during its first demo last month. Besides the answer, the whole organization was rated as a poor display for a such announcement by the audience, and most were shocked to see such performance from the number 1 search engine company.

In an article on March 8, 2023, Bing Vice President Yusuf Mehdi spoke about the New Bing and Edge and their progress.

Overall, Bing may still be a minor player in the search engine market, but most predict this won’t be the case for long. As Microsoft continues to develop and improve Bing, it will be intriguing to see how it fares against Google and other search engines in the future.