Microsoft threatens to restrict access to Bing’s internet-search data to rival companies providing AI-powered online search tools
- Microsoft has told at least two licensee firms that using its Bing search index to feed their AI chat tools violates the terms of their contract
- Bing’s search index – a map of the internet that can be quickly scanned in real time – is licensed by Microsoft to other firms that offer web search
Rivals quickly moved to roll out their own AI chatbots as hype built around the buzzy technology.
You.com and Neeva – two newer search engines that debuted in 2021 – have also debuted AI-fuelled search services, YouChat and NeevaAI.
DuckDuckGo, You.com and Neeva’s regular search engines all use Bing to provide some of their information, because indexing the entire web is costly – it requires servers to store data and a constant crawl of the internet to incorporate updates. It would be similarly complex and pricey to get together that data for a search chatbot.
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Microsoft has told at least two customers that using its Bing search index to feed their AI chat tools violates the terms of their contract, according to the people, who spoke anonymously because they were discussing a confidential dispute.
The Redmond, Washington-based technology company said it may terminate the licences providing access to its search index, the people said.
Microsoft did not have an immediate comment.
If they were cut off from Microsoft’s index, smaller search engines would have a hard time finding an alternative. Microsoft and Google are the only two companies that index the entire web, and Google’s limitations on the use of its index have led nearly all other search engines to use Bing.