What is Bing? Here is everything you need to know
October 31, 2023Bing is a useful search engine tool owned by Microsoft. It helps you find what you're looking for when you search online. Bing offers various types of searches like web, images, videos, and maps. It also works well for local searches, such as finding restaurants nearby.
The prominent IT company, Microsoft, announced Bing on May 28, 2009, and it officially launched on June 3 of the same year. Bing replaced Live Search, which had earlier been known as MSN Search. Microsoft even bought a company called Powerset to make Bing better. Bing also powers most of Yahoo! Search.
Choosing between Bing and Google depends on your needs. Bing is good for some things, like cheaper ads. But Google might be better if you need specific information. Here's a quick look at the pros and cons of Bing:
Pros:
- You can find information beyond search results
- Great for searching videos
- Easy image search
- Looks nice and user-friendly
- Good for reaching older, wealthier audiences
- Built-in AI answers from Microsoft Copilot
- Rewards points for searching
Cons:
- Puts older sites ahead of forums
- Sometimes struggles to understand what you mean
- Doesn't have as wide a reach
If you want lots of information and news or want to reach older folks with ads, Bing could be right for you. But it's not for everyone.
Interesting Bing Features
Bing Background Images: Bing has beautiful daily background images, like nature scenes or famous places. You can even use them as your computer's wallpaper.
Copilot Search: Since April 2025, Bing has offered Copilot Search, a mode that answers your question with an AI-generated summary and lists the web sources it used.
Microsoft Rewards: Bing Rewards was renamed Microsoft Rewards in 2016. You earn points for searching with Bing and for other activities, such as playing Xbox games, and you can redeem them for gift cards or donate them to nonprofit organizations. In 2026, Microsoft introduced three levels, Member, Silver, and Gold, and the higher your level, the more search points you can earn each day.
Bing Visual Search: Bing lets you search using pictures. You can take a photo of something and find out more about it.
Video previews: Bing makes it easy to find and preview videos without leaving the results page.
Microsoft Advertising: Microsoft's advertising platform, called Bing Ads until 2019, helps businesses reach customers on Bing and other Microsoft services and track how their ads perform.
Bing's Integration with Other Services
Bing is built into Microsoft products: it is the default search engine in Microsoft Edge, provides web results in Windows search, and supplies web information to Copilot. Other search engines use its index too, including Yahoo! Search and, as one of several sources, DuckDuckGo. For developers, Microsoft retired the public Bing Search APIs on August 11, 2025 and now points them to Grounding with Bing Search in Azure AI Agents.
Big partners have come and gone. Apple used Bing for Siri's web results from 2013 until 2017, when it switched to Google. In 2023, Samsung considered making Bing the default search engine on its Galaxy phones, but it later dropped the idea and kept Google. The same year, Microsoft launched the new Bing, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, which brought AI chat into search.
Bing vs. Google
Both Bing and Google are great search engines, but Google is far bigger. According to StatCounter, Google had about 90% of the worldwide search market in September 2026 and Bing about 5%, although Bing's share was higher on desktop computers (about 15%) and in the US (about 10%).
Both companies now build AI into search. The new Bing was opened to everyone in 2023, and the Bing chatbot has since grown into Microsoft Copilot. Google has answered with AI Overviews and AI Mode in its own results. Bing still shines in image and video search, while Google is known for its YouTube platform and its huge reach. For website owners, Bing offers Bing Webmaster Tools and supports IndexNow, a protocol that lets sites notify search engines instantly when pages are added, updated, or deleted.
So, choosing between Bing and Google comes down to what you prefer and what you need. Both have their strengths!
