Microsoft is retiring Bing Search APIs on August 11, directing customers toward AI products as an alternative.
Microsoft confirmed: “Any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned completely, and the product will no longer be available for usage or new customer signup.”
While users with longstanding agreements or contracts with Microsoft, like DuckDuckGo, will reportedly not be immediately affected, the message is clear: stop using the Bing Search APIs and rely on summaries generated by the company’s LLMs.
Goodbye Bing search proxies in August, minus the ones that have already organized contracts with Microsoft.
This is such an…interesting move.
Are the LLM summaries really a cheaper solution for Microsoft to deliver than using their search engine? In fact, isn’t it more expensive because they’re querying their search engine for results in the background which they then summarize and give back? Why is Microsoft replacing a cheaper, functioning service with something more expensive that few companies would want?
I’m skeptical that LLM summaries will be cheaper than straight organic crawl because I don’t think they can really give up the crawl at the back end. You need the crawl to find new websites and cull dead sites, so you end up still having to do both. That has to be expensive. But I could be completely wrong because I’m no expert. Obviously, MS thinks this is the way forward.
This will weed out some of the smaller Bing clones, and make room for other players, which I see as a good thing for web search in general.
Syndication of Bing search to many smaller search services, was a survival strategy for MS, to keep Bing alive over the last decade until such a time as Google somehow fumbled the ball or otherwise became vulnerable as they are now. IMHO MS now sees their chance to gain big market share from Google and they want that all consolidated towards Bing proper not a gaggle of other players using Bing. So consolidation.
Personally, I think the shine will dull once everyone is using LLM summaries. After awhile, I think a significant group will still want 10 links in a serp.
Why did they raise prices in 2023? Why did they make legal threats to significant paying customers who were using the Bing API, for in their chat based AI answers, later in 2023? I don’t know for sure, but you can imagine and speculate. It cannot be coincidental that they were pursuing CoPilot very aggressively then, and going all-in with OpenAI.
(Aspiring) monopolists work to control markets as far as they can get away with it. And they have been in that game longer than Google.
They also laid off 3% of the global workforce last week, so that might be a factor.
We also got featured in computing.co.uk; in this case with much more about my perspective.
UK-based Mojeek, also builds its own indexes rather than relying on Bing or Google. CEO Colin Hayhurst said Microsoft shelving the Bing API was “not totally surprising” after the massive price hikes earlier.
“That change in 2023 abandoned the smaller search partners and scared the bigger ones. What will this do to them? I’ve heard that some of the bigger ones are OK, but who didn’t make the cut? And how long do those that did have?”
… Hayhurst was bullish about the prospects for independent search, anticipating that, along with the Kagi engine, others will integrate Mojeek’s API, having been “spooked” at the recent price rises. “We have made big strides in search quality and our API service in the last two years,” he said.
He was also scathing about the use of GenAI in pure search: “After ChatGPT came out our traffic started rising faster. Soon we might be the only web search (information retrieval) engine left. Then again, we are not chasing the ‘answer engine’ golden goose.”