Numerous engineers who spoke with WIRED were surprised by the cutoff, which is scheduled to begin on August 11. Clients were informed of it on Monday via an email from Microsoft and a blog on the company’s website. They were advised to think about using” Grounding with Bing Search as part of Azure AI Agents,” a Microsoft service that enables chatbots like ChatGPT to use “real-time public web data” to augment AI-generated responses. Some developers believe that the AI-focused solution is inadequate.
Donny Turnbaugh, a spokesman for Microsoft, claims that the company is shutting down the Bing Search APIs as it “better meets market need for having AI answers.” He added that the business has a” help plan in place,” and that affected customers can reach out with inquiries without providing more information.
After developing its own systems in 2023, Brave, the privacy-focused search website, stopped using the Bing Search APIs, and Brian Brown, the chief business officer of Microsoft, claims that it is” sending a clear sign” to another research businesses that it is tightening loose ends in the face of growing competitors.
According to a person with knowledge of the situation who was granted secrecy to protect business relationships, the largest Bing API consumers will continue to have access after August 11. However, the change may also cause great spenders to be concerned about Microsoft’s long-term prospects and spur them to make internal efforts to find alternatives more effective.
According to business spokesman Kamyl Bazbaz, one of the largest buyers who is currently unaffected is DuckDuckGo. According to Bazbaz,” they’re retiring the self-serve edition.” According to Brave, it is believed that businesses that have entered into long-term, secret agreements with Microsoft will continue to have access to the APIs.
Microsoft did not respond to questions about whether cutting costs was to blame for the closure or whether some customers would be exempt. The business eliminated about 6, 000 of its people, or about 3 % of its workforce, on Tuesday, in a walk it deemed necessary to do so.
The absence of the Bing APIs adds another layer of richness to the search engines’ long-standing status as the most widely used gateway to the web, which are already questionable. For the first time in a long time, the development of ChatGPT and another AI bots that can help users locate information more effectively has fueled new competition in the market. Actions that could restrain Google’s dominance of research and draw more attention from the general public are also emerging from antitrust investigations launched by US authorities. However, despite the rumors, Google has hardly lost any business share thus far.
Microsoft helped different search engines reduce the time and expense of crawling billions of pages and creating a searchable index of all applicable information through the Bing APIs. The tools made it possible for them to submit queries and obtain up answers for what appeared to be a reasonable price to give their own users.
Over the years, the APIs have helped to support both standard search engines like DuckDuckGo, Brave, and You.com as well as more specific tools used by businesses and online experts to seek particular areas of the web. Results frequently weren’t while high-quality as regular Google search results, but Google’s close API has a number of restrictions that have made it unattractive to potential rivals.
After ChatGPT was released in 2022, Microsoft increased the cost of the Bing APIs by up to ten times, citing improvements it had made to the output value. Some users did so as a result of this, beginning to invest in their own online indicators, an endeavor that had become less expensive as time went on. According to the people with knowledge of the situation, thousands of customers still use the Bing APIs.
Developers claim that the new AI-powered program that Microsoft is developing works with a smaller number of circumstances and provides descriptions rather than natural search results. One designer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were never given permission by their employer to speak to the media, claims that the program has “tighter inclusion and less flexibility.”
Private scholar Tim Libert claims one method he used to search through a long list of medical names to retrieve the URLs of their websites for the Bing APIs. Regular hunting is more labor intensive, and he claims that the” AI abomination” Microsoft is turning to is more complex than necessary.
Among the businesses that also offer resources comparable to those that Microsoft is retiring are Mojeek, Brave, You.com, and Exa. Richard Socher, the CEO of You.com, tells WIRED that the startup’s API has generated a sizable amount of revenue. Mojeek’s CEO, Colin Hayhurst, believes that “anything that lifts up the search industry is good for his business and the economy as a whole.
However, some developers think the Bing APIs are more powerful or feature-rich than any other choice. They point out that thousands of research scientists work for Bing, compared to startups who work for a fee, in comparison.
Google might be forced to make an announcement as Microsoft moves to restrict exposure. The US Department of Justice just lost an antitrust case, and a federal prosecutor is expected to rule on preventative measures later this year. One possibility is that Google might have to offer more of its research information to rivals. One of the first businesses to submit a request for accessibility may be Microsoft, which testified that the use and data used to produce Website results have been hampered by limited use.
