Microsoft-owned Bing has achieved more growth in the number of people who visit the little-used search engine vs market leader Google in page visits — following the integration of OpenAI’s technology, according to data from analytics firm Similarweb.
Page visits on Bing search engine have increased by 15.8 percent since Microsoft unveiled its artificial intelligence-powered version on February 7, compared with a near 1 percent decline for the Alphabet Inc-owned search engine, data till March 20 showed.
The figures are an early sign of the lead the Windows maker has taken in its fast-moving race with Google for generative AI dominance, thanks to the technology behind ChatGPT. Microsoft has made significant investment in OpenAI.
This is a big opportunity for Microsoft to make inroads in the over $120 billion search market. Google has been the dominant player in online search for decades with a share of more than 80 percent, news report in Reuters said.
The size of Google’s advertising business revenue in 2022 was $59.042 billion and it includes $42.604 billion from Google online search. Microsoft, which is thriving on Cloud business, does not reveal the size of its revenue from Bing search business.
Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson & Co, said that he expects Bing to gain market share in search over the next coming months, especially if Google continues to delay the integration of generative AI into its product.
Bing AI has been available to most users around the world since February. Google began the public release of its chatbot Bard only on Tuesday.
“Bing has less than a tenth of Google’s market share, so even if it converts 1 percent or 2 percent of users it will be materially beneficial to Bing and Microsoft,” Gil Luria said.
App downloads for Bing have also jumped eight times globally after AI integration, according to app research firm Data.ai. Downloads for the Google search app fell 2 percent in the same period.
Some analysts said that Google, which in the early 2000s unseated then leader Yahoo to become the dominant search player, could overcome the early setbacks to maintain its lead.
“Google’s ranking algorithm can have a competitive edge over that of competitors”, said Yongjei Jeong, an analyst at Mirae Asset Securities in South Korea, referring to how Google’s algorithm helped it beat Yahoo Search.
