Bing is 15 years today: What's its legacy?

Bing is 15 today – I can’t believe it .... It feels like just yesterday we were celebrating 10 years and I was writing a blog about all the lessons learned in that time . As we hit 15, those same lessons still apply, and it’s also got me wondering about what Bing has done for search, the tech industry, and society.

The industry has obviously shifted over the past 15 years, and especially in the last year and a half with the new wave of AI-powered search ignited by Bing Chat, now Copilot. I’ve spent a significant part of my professional career working on Bing, and so I have a vested interest in making sure it has a positive legacy. Here are a few of what I consider to be Bing’s key positive contributions:??

Competition and innovation?

If you look back over the years, we’ve tried many things to differentiate in search with mixed success. But ultimately, what I hope we’ve done is pushed our product, our competitors’ products, and the search industry forward. As an example, when we integrated Bing Chat into Bing last year, we also shipped LLM-powered chat answers in the Bing main search results.?We later saw how our competitors shipped similar experiences, and we are continuing to innovate with LLMs on features like Deep search .?By providing a source of competition and innovation, we’ve hopefully made search as a whole better for everyone.??

Giving back

One of the most enduring features of Bing, and one of my favorites, has been our Rewards loyalty program. Whether it's allowing people to donate to the causes that are most important to them (Microsoft Rewards has donated over $20.6 million as of April 2024) or putting their points toward a gift card, I love the idea that we are giving back and investing in our users. Microsoft Rewards is in over 200 countries and regions today.

Keeping LLMs fresh and grounded

One of the main reasons our first iteration of Copilot was launched as a part of Bing is because search is foundational to the functional application of LLMs. Without search, these chat responses from the LLMs are not up to date and suffer from significant hallucinations. It's the combination of real-time information from Bing search grounding (RAG) with LLMs that delivers the freshest, most accurate chat responses. Some people wonder if LLMs will replace search, but actually LLMs have made search more important than ever. This is why Open AI, Meta and others have licensed the Bing search API for their chatbots. I’m excited to see how AI can continue to help make users more productive, and I love that Bing is at the center of that for Copilot and our partner products.?

I truly believe that search is a critical technology for society, and I like to think that Bing has helped to improve it by giving people choice in how they search and hopefully some delight as well. It also gets me really excited to witness this wave of AI technology, and I’m excited to see how we can continue to innovate in search.

Lastly, let me thank you very much if you are using Bing or have used it even once. You have been part of our journey and have helped us make search better for everyone.