Bing (search engine)
Bing is a web search engine developed by Microsoft, launched in 2009 as a competitor to Google, which dominates the search engine market. Designed with a user-friendly interface, Bing offers innovative features, such as a dropdown menu for suggested searches, hover previews of search results, and the ability to present information directly on the search results page rather than simply linking to other websites. Bing's capabilities extend to image searches, where users can upload images to find similar content, and it functions as a calculator for basic queries. The search engine has garnered a significant user base, controlling around one-third of the market as of 2016, aided by partnerships with platforms like Yahoo and AOL. Microsoft also incentivizes users through its Bing Rewards program, offering various rewards for regular use. Looking to the future, Microsoft plans to integrate Bing more deeply into its applications and enhance its search capabilities through artificial intelligence and the combined efforts of its research teams.
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Bing (search engine)
Bing is a search engine created by Microsoft Corporation. Search engines index web pages by searchable keywords, making web pages more accessible to users. Bing was created to compete with Google, one of the most popular search engines in the world. Bing-powered search engines control roughly one-third of the search engine market and are used billions of times per month. Bing boasts a variety of innovative features and has several state-of-the-art devices by default.
Background
Search engines index web pages, sorting them into easily accessible databases. They are composed of two elements: a crawler and an index builder. Crawlers follow links between web pages, recording the URL address and taking note of important keywords. Index builders then organize these pages by the keywords they contain, as well as by popularity and a variety of other factors. These pages are stored in a database, which is searchable by individual Internet users.
The first search engine, the World Wide Web Wanderer, was created in 1993. Its primary purpose was to track and catalog the growth of the Internet, making these statistics available to Internet users. The following year, its competitor, WebCrawler, was released. At the time, WebCrawler had indexed roughly six thousand documents.
WebCrawler was quickly dwarfed by the Lycos search engine, which was released in 1994. At launch, Lycos had indexed more than fifty thousand documents. From that point, search engines continued to index the growing Internet at an astounding rate. Competition between search engines focused less on how many web pages could be indexed and more on making indexed results accessible to users. AltaVista, released in 1995, was the first search engine to offer users the ability to search in multiple languages.
In 1998, the search engine Google was first made public. It could be accessed from a simple, uncluttered home page that many users found attractive. More importantly, Google's sorting algorithm was significantly more efficient than its competitors' were. It quickly became the most popular search engine by a wide market. In the process, Google grew into a large and powerful technology-focused corporation.
Overview
Google's command of the search engine market did not go unnoticed by the tech giant Microsoft. In an effort to compete with Google, Microsoft decided to create a new search engine. The company had created several search engines in the past, including MSN Search and Live Search. However, all had failed to amass a similar user base to Google.
Microsoft designers decided to imbue their new engine's interface with a variety of innovative features in an attempt to counter Google's minimalist design. When a user enters a topic into the Bing search box, a dropdown menu automatically suggests related searches. Additionally, hovering the cursor over a search result opens a convenient preview of that web page. Lastly, these features are wrapped in a convenient user interface (UI) that stays consistent across multiple search styles, including image searches and video searches. Microsoft dubbed the new search engine Bing and released it to the public in 2009.
Since then, Bing has developed a variety of other useful features. The search engine itself is capable of finding, organizing, and presenting basic information instead of simply redirecting to a relevant archived website. For example, if a user needs shipping information from Amazon, Bing can find and present that information on the first page of search results. Bing users may also utilize its "image match" feature. Image match allows users to upload an image file from their computer. Bing will then search its records for any instance of that image file and catalog them for the user. Additionally, if a user types basic calculations into Bing, the search engine will act as a calculator.
Microsoft offers a Bing Rewards program. In exchange for making an account, completing daily goals, and using Bing regularly, users are given rewards. These may include gift cards, additional online file storage, or free premium memberships to online services.
By 2024, Google had remained the dominant search engine, capturing nearly 92 percent of the search engine market. Google's popularity peaked in 2014, while Bing's popularity continued to rise. As of 2024, Bing controlled more than 4 percent of the global market and more than 7 percent of the US market. However, in September 2023, Microsoft announced plans to incorporate many artificial intelligence (AI) features into Bing, hoping to make the search engine more popular. One of these features was Copilot, which users could use to find answers to complicated questions.
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