For context, Microsoft licenses the Bing search index data to other search engines like Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, allowing them to offer web searches. Earlier this year, Microsoft added a version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Bing, which seems to have triggered a flurry of activity among rival search engines.
To stay ahead of the game, Google recently unleashed its conversational AI product, Bard. Meanwhile, DuckDuckGo has introduced DuckAssist, an AI-powered feature that summarizes answers to search queries. At the same time, You.com and Neeva Inc. have also jumped on the AI chatbot bandwagon with YouChat and NeevaAI.
Search engines like DuckDuckGo, You.com, and Neeva rely on Microsoft’s Bing search index data to make these chatbots work. After all, indexing the entire web is a massive undertaking that requires servers to store huge amounts of data and constant crawling to keep everything up to date.
Insiders reveal that Microsoft has warned at least two customers that using its Bing search index data to power their AI chatbots violates their contract. In fact, Microsoft has even gone so far as to threaten to terminate the licenses providing access to its search index entirely!
Microsoft said;
“We’ve been in touch with partners who are out of compliance as we continue to consistently enforce our terms across the board,
The statement extended with the following words,
“We’ll continue to work with them directly and provide any information needed to find a path forward.”
Smaller search engines would face the daunting challenge of finding an alternative if they were to lose access to Microsoft’s index. Currently, only Microsoft and Google have the capability to index the entire web. Moreover, Google’s restrictions on the use of its index have prompted almost all other search engines to rely on Bing.
Introduction of BARD:
BARD is a cutting-edge language model that helps computers better understand and process human language, just like our old friend ChatGPT. Built on the powerful Transformer architecture introduced by Vaswani in 2017, BARD is optimized to handle data sequences like sentences or paragraphs in parallel, making it incredibly efficient.
BARD leverages the power of “bidirectional encoding” to process language, enabling it to consider the context before and after each word in a sentence. This approach enhances its ability to comprehend the meaning of individual words and their interconnections.
Although it’s under testing, it was announced by the company this AI is more powerful than its competitor, i.e., ChatGPT, in numerous aspects. ChatGPT provides the information up to September 2021. But in the case of BARD, it provides real-time information.
Microsoft threatens to cut off access to its internet-search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they don’t stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence chat products https://t.co/LlfRWpWAM3
— Bloomberg (@business) March 25, 2023
