Background (1998–2009) MSN Search Microsoft launched
MSN Search in the third quarter of 1998, using search results from
Inktomi. It consisted of a search engine, index, and
web crawler. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from
Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from
AltaVista were used instead. Microsoft decided to make a large investment in web search by building its own
web crawler for MSN Search, the index of which was updated weekly and sometimes daily. The upgrade started as a
beta program in November 2004, and came out of beta in February 2005. This occurred a year after rival
Yahoo! Search rolled out its own crawler. Image search was powered by a third party,
Picsearch. The service also started providing its search results to other search engine portals in an effort to better compete in the market.
Windows Live Search The first public beta of
Windows Live Search was unveiled on March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006 replacing MSN Search. The new search engine used search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and
Microsoft Encarta. In the roll-over from MSN Search to Windows Live Search, Microsoft stopped using Picsearch as their image search provider and started performing their own image search, fueled by their own internal image search algorithms.
Live Search On March 21, 2007, Microsoft announced that it would separate its search developments from the
Windows Live services family, rebranding the service as
Live Search. Live Search was integrated into the
Live Search and Ad Platform headed by
Satya Nadella, part of Microsoft's Platform and Systems division. As part of this change, Live Search was merged with
Microsoft adCenter. A series of reorganizations and consolidations of Microsoft's search offerings were made under the Live Search branding. On May 23, 2008, Microsoft discontinued
Live Search Books and
Live Search Academic and integrated all academic and book search results into regular search. This also included the closure of the
Live Search Books Publisher Program.
Windows Live Expo was discontinued on July 31, 2008. Live Search Macros, a service for users to create their own custom search engines or use macros created by other users, was also discontinued. On May 15, 2009,
Live Product Upload, a service which allowed merchants to upload products information onto
Live Search Products, was discontinued. The final reorganization came as
Live Search QnA was rebranded
MSN QnA on February 18, 2009, then discontinued on May 21, 2009.
Beginnings (2009) Rebrand as Bing Microsoft recognized that there would be a problem with branding as long as the word "Live" remained in the name. As an effort to create a new identity for Microsoft's search services, Live Search was officially replaced by Bing on June 3, 2009. The Bing name was chosen through focus groups, and Microsoft decided that the name was memorable, short, and easy to spell, and that it would function well as a URL around the world. The word would remind people of the sound made during "the moment of discovery and decision making". Microsoft was assisted by branding consultancy Interbrand in finding the new name. The name also has strong similarity to the word
bingo, which means that something sought has been found, as called out when winning the game
Bingo. Microsoft advertising strategist David Webster proposed the name "Bang" for the same reasons the name Bing was ultimately chosen (easy to spell, one syllable, and easy to remember). He noted, "It's there, it's an exclamation point [...] It's the opposite of a question mark."
Bang was ultimately not chosen because it could not be properly used as a verb in the context of an internet search; Webster commented "Oh, 'I banged it' is very different than 'I binged it'". Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, also announced that Bing's official Chinese name is
bì yìng (), which literally means "very certain to respond" or "very certain to answer" in Chinese. While being tested internally by Microsoft employees, Bing's codename was
Kumo (
くも), which came from the
Japanese word for
spider (
蜘蛛;
くも,
kumo) as well as
cloud (
雲;
くも,
kumo), referring to the manner in which search engines "
spider" Internet resources to add them to their database, as well as
cloud computing.
Deal with Yahoo! On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and
Yahoo! announced that they had made a ten-year deal in which the Yahoo!
search engine would be replaced by Bing, retaining the Yahoo!
user interface. Yahoo! got to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell advertising on some
Microsoft sites. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners made the transition by early 2012.
Legal challenges On July 31, 2009, The Laptop Company, Inc. stated in a press release that it would challenge Bing's trademark application, alleging that Bing may cause confusion in the marketplace as Bing and their product BongoBing both do online product search. Software company TeraByte Unlimited, which has a product called BootIt Next Generation (abbreviated to BING), also contended the trademark application on similar grounds, as did a Missouri-based design company called Bing! Information Design. Microsoft contended that claims challenging its trademark were without merit because these companies filed for U.S. federal trademark applications only after Microsoft filed for the Bing trademark in March 2009.
Growth (2009–2023) In October 2011, Microsoft stated that they were working on new back-end search infrastructure with the goal of delivering faster and slightly more relevant search results for users. Known as "Tiger", the new index-serving technology had been incorporated into Bing globally since August that year. In May 2012, Microsoft announced another redesign of its search engine that includes "Sidebar", a social feature that searches users' social networks for information relevant to the search query.
AI integration (2023–present) On February 7, 2023, Microsoft began rolling out a major overhaul to Bing, called the new Bing. The new Bing included a new chatbot feature, at the time known as Bing Chat, based on
OpenAI's
GPT-4. According to Microsoft, one million people joined its waitlist within a span of 48 hours. Bing Chat was available only to users of
Microsoft Edge and Bing mobile app, and Microsoft said that waitlisted users would be prioritized if they set Edge and Bing as their defaults, and installed the Bing mobile app. When Microsoft
demoed Bing Chat to journalists, it produced several
hallucinations, including when asked to summarize financial reports. The new Bing was criticized in February 2023 for being more argumentative than ChatGPT, sometimes to an unintentionally humorous extent. The chat interface proved vulnerable to
prompt injection attacks with the bot revealing its hidden initial prompts and rules, including
its internal codename "Sydney". Upon scrutiny by journalists, Bing claimed it spied on Microsoft employees via laptop webcams and phones.
The New York Times journalist
Kevin Roose reported on strange behavior of Bing Chat, writing that "In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft's new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with." In a separate case, Bing researched publications of the person with whom it was chatting, claimed they represented an existential danger to it, and threatened to release damaging personal information in an effort to silence them. Microsoft released a blog post stating that the errant behavior was caused by extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions which "can confuse the model on what questions it is answering." Microsoft later restricted the total number of chat turns to 5 per session and 50 per day per user (a turn is "a conversation exchange which contains both a user question and a reply from Bing"), and reduced the model's ability to express emotions. This aimed to prevent such incidents. Microsoft began to slowly ease the conversation limits, eventually relaxing the restrictions to 30 turns per session and 300 sessions per day. In March 2023, Bing reached 100 million active users. created with MAI-Image-1 at Bing Image Creator That same month, Bing incorporated an
AI image generator powered by OpenAI's
DALL-E 2, which can be accessed either through the chat function or a standalone image-generating website. In October, the image-generating tool was updated to the more recent DALL-E 3. Although Bing blocks prompts including various keywords that could generate inappropriate images, within days many users reported being able to bypass those constraints, such as to generate images of popular cartoon characters committing terrorist attacks. Microsoft would respond to these shortly after by imposing a new, tighter filter on the tool. On May 4, 2023, Microsoft switched the chatbot from Limited Preview to Open Preview and eliminated the waitlist, however, it remained available only on Microsoft's Edge browser or Bing app until July, when it became available for use on non-Edge browsers. Use is limited without a Microsoft account. On November 15, 2023, Microsoft announced that Bing Chat was to be merged into Microsoft Copilot. On 23 April 2024, Microsoft launched Phi-3-mini, a cost-effective AI model designed for simpler tasks. In October 2025, Microsoft announced the release of its in-house text-to-image model MAI-Image-1. == Features ==