In a warning, the company said it would block two search engines from accessing Bing’s data if they continued to use it to train ChatGPT-like tools.
Microsoft doesn’t want its competitors to use the Bing search index to power new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots . According to Bloomberg, the company would have sent the report to two search engines that use Bing to complement their search engines that would prevent them from accessing search data if they continued to use it with their AI tools.
Microsoft typically licenses Bing search data to a number of companies, including DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and the AI search engine You.com.
While DuckDuckGo, for example, uses a combination of Bing and its own search engine to provide search results, You.com and Neeva also pull some of their results from Bing, helping to save time and resources that go along with crawling the entire web.
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Sources close to the situation told Bloomberg that Microsoft believes that using Bing data in this way is a breach of its contract and that it may choose to terminate its agreements with search engines accused of misusing this information.
While we don’t yet know which search engines Bloomberg is referring to in its report, last month DuckDuckGo launched DuckAssist, a tool that provides AI-generated summaries of Wikipedia and other sources for certain searches.
Meanwhile, You.com offers an AI-powered chat feature that provides answers to users’ questions, and Neeva has released a similar AI-powered tool that generates annotated summaries.
With more companies like Google pitching their ideas to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft likely wants to make its own search data unique to Bing’s chatbot.
