What you need to know
- Microsoft announced that it has achieved 100 million daily active users on Bing.
- The announcement comes just one month after the company integrated OpenAI's ChatGPT technology.
- Roughly one-third of those previewing the new Bing are new to the search engine.
Microsoft is celebrating a milestone for Bing, the search engine that always seems to forever be in Google's shadow. This week, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, announced that the search engine reached a significant milestone in daily use.
"We are pleased to share that after a number of years of steady progress, and with a little bit of a boost from the million+ new Bing preview users, we have crossed 100M Daily Active Users of Bing," states Mehdi in the blog post.
The announcement comes just over a month after the new Bing preview was launched, integrating OpenAI's ChatGPT technology into the service. The preview has been available on desktop and on iOS and Android phones via the mobile app, allowing users to send a series of queries in the form of a chat.
The new Bing and Edge preview is open to the public, which makes it especially hard to ignore for those already loyal to Edge. The browser was also upgraded with the new Bing AI capabilities in the Edge sidebar, which provides quick access to the chat service and new creation tools.
Mehdi says that of the more than one million users that signed up for the new Bing preview, one-third are new to the search engine, which means Microsoft is finally reaching people who may not have considered using Bing before now. Our own poll revealed that plenty of people interested in switching to Bing, which was already a good sign for the company. However, even with the recent boom in users, Mehdi recognizes that Microsoft is still far behind the 1 billion daily active users on Google Search.
"This is a surprisingly notable figure, and yet we are fully aware we remain a small, low, single digit share player. That said, it feels good to be at the dance!"
Of course, things with the new Bing preview haven't been perfect, and users have demonstrated their ability to seemingly "break" the AI chatbot. However, the company has since put limits on chats and has since started raising them again. Microsoft even incorporated a personality toggle to improve responses.
Of course, it's only been a month, and the new Bing AI chatbot is still a preview for now, meaning there are likely to be some quirks as Microsoft gains feedback from its bevy of new users. However, Mehdi says the team is "energized" to continue improving the experience.
