There’s not much chance Microsoft’s Bing will ever topple Google Chrome when it comes to the world’s web searching. But the company has announced a new milestone thanks to its recent integration with ChatGPT.
Microsoft’s so-called "new Bing" was launched as a preview last month and the company says it’s now sailed past the 100 million daily active users threshold.
“This is a surprisingly notable figure, and yet we are fully aware we remain a small, low, single digit share player,” said corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, Yusuf Mehdi. “That said, it feels good to be at the dance!”
Microsoft goes on to point out a third of those increased users are new to Bing, and that they’re seeing extra engagement as well as the growth itself.
“Roughly one third of daily preview users are using Chat daily. We’re seeing on average, roughly three chats per session with more than 45 million total chats since the preview began”. Mehdi added. “And 15 percent of Chat sessions are people using Bing to generate new content demonstrating we are extending search to creativity.”
We’ll just slide in at this point to remind you Microsoft likely experiences a handy bump in Bing users from its Edge browser; the default on Windows laptops. Even if you try and switch to a rival, you can expect some passive-aggressive suggestions from Edge to go back to Bing instead.
But still, Microsoft’s gains are not to be sniffed at. The company moved fast to integrate the chatbot into its search engine and it could be giving us a look at the future of internet search.
Thanks to the conversational AI, ‘new Bing’ will provide results in a more conversational tone instead of just firing out a bunch of links. You’ll be able to see as Bing parses your questions and searches for answers. You can also help refine your search by telling Bing what you think of its results.
How to get the ‘new Bing’ with ChatGPT
While you can access Bing from any browser, right now the only way to access the new Bing with ChatGPT functionality via a web browser is to open it in Microsoft's Edge.
It can also be used in the Bing app and the mobile app version of the Edge web browser.
Even if you use those apps though, you may well not (yet) have access to Bing with ChatGPT. Microsoft is rolling out access to the new Bing with ChatGPT to a very limited group of people initially, though it should become more widely available as the bugs get ironed out. If you want access, you'll need to join the waitlist for the new Bing.
To join the waitlist you’ll need to navigate to bing.com/new and hit “Join the waitlist."
While Microsoft may be touting its progress with ChatGPT, it’s still nowhere near closing the vast gulf that exists between Bing and Google. Google doesn’t reveal its usage figures but recent data from Statcounter suggests that last month, 88.98% of all search traffic in the U.S. was handled by Google. Bing only managed a 6.35% slice of that particular pie.
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