The US government is taking legal action against GOOGLE, alleging that it has employed monopolistic strategies such as making its search engine the default option in popular programs like Android, Chrome, and Safari, which is blamed for the absence of competition in web search.
Some search engines attempting to attract users with privacy safeguards or searches without ads state that their latest difficulty is not from Google but from Microsoft and its Bing search engine, causing them frustration.
Startups specializing in search have long utilized licensing of search results from Bing, leveraging the expansive web indexing capabilities that a small company would find difficult to finance and supplementing it with their specialties and approaches to query interpretation.
Microsoft’s launch of a Bing search chatbot, driven by the same technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has raised fears that Microsoft is taking advantage of its search data clients as it works to gain more market share from Google.
In early February, Microsoft launched Bing chat and then just one week later revealed that the company’s fees for search data could potentially rise to 10 times more than usual come May.
The company has implemented a new rule that immediately stops startups from competing with Bing chat or Google’s competitor chatbot, Bard.
A rule has been put in place which charges customers extremely high costs – potentially even 28 times higher than Microsoft’s one-time fees – if they are giving Bing results to users on a page that contains content from large language models (LLMs), which powers ChatGPT and the chat feature of Bing.
A startup with its LLM-powered search chatbot can expect to pay $200 for each 1,000 Bing searches, a significant increase from the $7 or $25 charged in previous and upcoming months, respectively.
Entrepreneurs looking for Microsoft data and wishing to implement chat-style features have found that the costs associated with using Bing would be too high. Unfortunately, the Microsoft search chatbot is unavailable through their API now.
Veterans of the search industry have claimed that Microsoft’s price increases further contribute to its history of limiting access to its search solutions for third-party developers.
D. Sivakumar, after spending 16 years researching search technology for both Google and Yahoo, went on to start his e-commerce search startup in 2021 – Tonita.
D. Sivakumar says:
“Bing squandered an opportunity to create a great ecosystem of search services, which I believe strongly would have ultimately benefited Bing in many ways,”
Caitlin Roulston, a representative for Microsoft, has reported that there will be a rise in cost.
ChatGPT’s emergence marks an exciting development in search technology, and its potential to revolutionize the way we search for information online is enormous. We will likely see even more exciting applications emerge as technology evolves and improves. Businesses must adapt to take advantage of this new era in search.
