![]() “The pricing change challenges our ability to offer a competitive and sustainable product,” he says. Bing previously offered an attractive balance between cost and quality, says founder Vladimir Prelovac. Kagi, a new search engine that charges a subscription fee but promises no ads or privacy compromises, is making its own transition. Brave, which provides 93 percent of its own results but still connects to Microsoft for image searches, estimates its Bing bill will triple, forcing the small company to speed up a “planned process of achieving total independence,” says its chief of search, Josep Pujol. Google’s comparable API fell out of favor, as its output can differ from the search giant’s regular results, and for some use cases it requires displaying ads that it sells.Īfter Bing’s price hikes and the launch of its new chat mode, some search startups are racing to find alternatives. Yahoo in 2009 stopped developing its own search engine technology and began licensing data from Bing instead. The service has become more or less the industry’s only option. In one cautionary tale, Cuil, a search startup launched in 2008 that developed its own index, ultimately shut down within about two years after reportedly burning through $33 million.īing APIs, or application programming interfaces, let other search engines send in queries and get back an ad-free feed of results, spelling suggestions, or related searches that they can present to their own users. Sending out bots to explore the entire web and compiling an index to make it all searchable is expensive, and what little investment many startups could raise to take on goliath Google was mostly dedicated to a novel interface or other features. “We are in early discussions with partners to explore additional opportunities and look forward to continuing to foster a healthy web ecosystem,” she says.īing has been essential to nearly every Western startup challenging Google, from DuckDuckGo starting in the late 2000s to You.com founded in 2020. The recent use of LLMs to help rank results has improved search quality more than any previous upgrade in the last 20 years, Roulston says. Microsoft spokesperson Caitlin Roulston says the price increases reflect growing investments to improve Bing, in ways that also benefit companies relying on its results.
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