Microsoft Celebrates 15 Years of Bing

Microsoft is marking the 15th anniversary of its Bing search service today, though its predecessors—MSN Search (1998), Windows Live Search (2006), and Live Search (2007)—date back many years earlier.

“Bing is 15 today … and it’s got me wondering about what Bing has done for search, the tech industry, and society,” Microsoft corporate vice president Jordi Ribas writes in a post on LinkedIn. “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.”

Ribas admits that Microsoft has seen only “mixed success” in trying to differentiate its search offering, but he still feels that the net impact has been positive. And he cites the integration of what’s now called Microsoft Copilot into Bing as an example, as the service’s competitors have all followed suit with similar capabilities.

He also notes that the Microsoft Rewards loyalty program has donated over $20.6 million to charity as of April 2024, allowing users to donate to the causes that are most important to them.

But Bing’s biggest contribution, he says, is in its “grounding” of large language models (LLMs) like Copilot.

“It’s the combination of real-time information from Bing search grounding (RAG) with LLMs that delivers the freshest, most accurate chat responses,” he says. “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.”