ChatGPT Opened a New Era in Search. Microsoft Could Ruin It

Google typically gets the blame for the lack of competition in web search. Search startups have long relied on licensing search results from Bing, tapping a web indexing operation larger than a small company could easily afford and adding their own features and ways of parsing queries. But Microsoft’s rollout of a Bing search chatbot based on technology underlying OpenAI’s ChatGPT has prompted concerns that Microsoft is unfairly squeezing out its search data customers as it launches a renewed attempt to bite off more market share from Google. A week after rolling out Bing chat in February, Microsoft announced that its standard fees for search data would increase by as much as 10 times starting in May. “Bing squandered an opportunity to create a great ecosystem of search services, which I believe strongly would have ultimately benefited Bing in many ways,” said D. Sivakumar, a research scientist who worked on search for 16 years at Google and Yahoo before starting the ecommerce search startup Tonita in 2021.