Bing is the web 🏷️#search-engine operated by 📝Microsoft, launched on June 3, 2009 as the successor to Live Search and rebranded Microsoft Bing in October 2020. It is free and ad-supported, monetized through Microsoft Advertising, and spans web, image, video, news, shopping, and map results alongside AI-generated answers. It is the second-largest general search engine worldwide behind 📝Google, holding roughly four to five percent of global query share — closer to ten percent on desktop and under one percent on mobile.
The index has long served surfaces beyond its own front end: Yahoo Search has run on it since 2010, and 📝DuckDuckGo draws a substantial share of its results from the same corpus, which is why Bing's ranking behavior matters well past Bing's own traffic. In February 2023 Microsoft folded a GPT-4-based chat experience into the product as Bing Chat, later renamed and absorbed into 📝Copilot. That absorption marked a strategic shift from selling search as a queryable surface to embedding it inside AI agents, and it carried a concrete cost for developers: Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on August 11, 2025, decommissioning existing instances outright and directing customers to Grounding with Bing Search inside Azure AI Agents. For practitioners, Bing remains a distinct ranking surface with its own webmaster tooling and its own 📝Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Key Features
- Web and vertical search — Web, image, video, news, shopping, and map results, with image search widely regarded as the product's strongest vertical.
- Copilot answers — AI-generated responses with inline citations sit above the classic result list, carried over from the GPT-4-based Bing Chat launched in 2023.
- Bing Webmaster Tools — Free crawl, index, and query reporting for site owners, plus IndexNow support for pushing changed URLs instead of waiting on a crawl.
- Microsoft Advertising — The paid-search marketplace on Bing inventory, syndicated across Yahoo and partner sites, typically at a lower cost per click than the equivalent paid auction.
- Grounding with Bing Search — The API successor: Azure AI Agents pull live web results as model grounding rather than developers querying an open search endpoint.