Microsoft has threatened to restrict data access to competitor AI search tools. These search chatbots try to integrate ChatGPT’s conversational abilities with the information offered by a traditional search engine.
According to people familiar with the disagreement, Microsoft Corp. has threatened to revoke access to its internet-search data, which it licences to other search engines, unless they stop make use of it as the ground work for their own AI chat products.
The data in its search index of Bing — an internet map that can be examined immediately in real time — is licenced to other web search companies, including DuckDuckGo and Apollo Global Management Inc.’s Yahoo. Microsoft adopted a relative of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat engine, into Bing in February.
Competitors rushed to launch their own AI chatbots as the excitement around the technology grew. Alphabet Inc.’s Google officially debuted Bard, its conversational AI tool, last week.
DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, unveiled DuckAssist, a function that employs artificial intelligence to summarise replies to search queries. Neeva Inc. andYou.com, two new-fangled search engines that debuted in 2021, have also debuted Artificial Intelligence powered search services, NeevaAI and YouChat.
These search chatbots try to integrate ChatGPT’s conversational abilities with the information offered by a traditional search engine. Because indexing the whole web is expensive — it requires servers to store data and a continual crawl of the internet to integrate updates — DuckDuckGo, You.com, and Neeva’s conventional search engines all use Bing to give some of their information. Obtaining that data for a search chatbot would be equally challenging and costly.
According to the persons who spoke anonymously because they were discussing a secret disagreement, Microsoft has informed at least two clients that utilising its Bing search index to feed its AI conversation capabilities breaches the terms of their contract. The technology giant located in Redmond, Washington, has stated that it may cancel the privileges that permit users to give access its search index.
Search engines that are small would find struggle to locate an option if Microsoft’s index was eliminated. Microsoft and Google are the only two businesses that index the whole web, and Google’s restrictions on how its index may be used have driven practically all other search engines to use Bing.
