Microsoft threatens to cut off access to the Bing search index for search companies such as DuckDuckGo, You.com if these companies use Microsoft data to serve AI chatbots.
According to Bloomberg, Microsoft has licensed the data in Bing search index (roughly translated: Bing search index) to companies providing web search services such as Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, You.com, Neeva. Recently, before the wave of AI (artificial intelligence), these companies have in turn introduced their own search engines and AI chatbots. Examples are DuckDuckGo’s DuckAssist, You.com’s YouChat and NeevaAI’s NeevaAI.
Bing search index includes articles, links on the website that have been recorded by Bing, indexed in the data bank. The reason other search engines have to rely on Microsoft’s Bing index to support data for AI is because the process of indexing the entire website is often very expensive and complicated, while DuckDuckGo, Neeva or You.com are just small companies in the field of search software.
However, Microsoft has just threatened to cut off access to the Bing search index for these companies if they continue to use Microsoft data to serve AI chatbots. Microsoft has sent warnings to at least two companies that this violates the terms of the contract
If Microsoft stops providing Bing search index data, small companies will have a hard time finding alternatives. Microsoft and Google are two companies capable of indexing entire web pages. Because Google restricts the use of its index, other companies must use indexes provided by Microsoft’s Bing.
This past February, Microsoft also integrated an AI-based chat engine into Bing. On March 21, Google entered the race by launching the Bard chatbot.
The maker of the Windows operating system announced that it is improving the Bing search engine and Edge browser with AI, demonstrating an effort to regain the leadership position in the search software market that the company has fallen behind. later for many years