According to people familiar with the disagreement, Microsoft Corp. threatened to take away access to its internet search data, which it licenses to competing search engines, if they don’t stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence chat products.
The data in the Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be scanned instantly in real time — is licensed to other web search companies, including Yahoo and DuckDuckGo from Apollo Global Management Inc. 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 excitement around the technology grew.
Google from Alphabet Inc. officially debuted Bard, its conversational AI tool, last week. DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, unveiled DuckAssist, a feature that uses artificial intelligence to summarize answers to queries.
You.com and Neeva Inc., two newer search engines launched in 2021, have also launched AI-powered search services, YouChat and NeevaAI, respectively.
These search chatbots try to integrate ChatGPT’s conversational capabilities with the information provided by a traditional search engine.
Because indexing the entire web is expensive — it takes servers to store data and a constant crawl of the web to integrate updates — DuckDuckGo, You.com, and Neeva’s conventional search engines all use Bing to share of their information.
Getting that data for a search chatbot would be just as difficult and expensive.
According to those who spoke anonymously for discussing a secret disagreement, Microsoft has informed at least two customers that using the Bing search index to power its AI conversation capabilities violates the terms of their contracts.
According to the individuals, the Redmond, Washington-based technology company may revoke the rights that allow access to its search index.
“We have interacted with non-compliant partners while consistently enforcing our terms across the board,” Microsoft said in a statement.
“We will continue to work directly with them and provide all the information necessary to find a way forward.”
Smaller search engines would struggle to find an alternative if they were removed from Microsoft’s index.
Microsoft and Google are the only two companies that index the entire web, and Google’s restrictions on index use have forced virtually all other search engines to use Bing.
