Through the API interfaces, Bing Microsoft has helped other search engines save costs and creep time for billions of websites and develop an index that can be searching for all available content. The tools allowed them to automatically send queries and recover the results that they could present to their users for an inexpensive fee.
Over the years, the API interfaces fueled both general search engines and Duckduckgo, Brave and You.com, as well as more specialized tools used by companies and online researchers to search for specific corners of the network. The results were often not as high as standard Google search results, but the comparable APi Google interface has a number of restrictions that made it unattractive for potential rivals.
After Chatgpt debuted in 2022, Microsoft raised the prices of API Bing interfaces up to 10 times, citing improvements that made the quality of the results. This prompted many users to start investing in their own network indexes, an exercise, which over time became less pricey thanks to up-to-date technologies. A person familiar with the case estimated that API Bing still has thousands of customers.
Developers say that the up-to-date AI Microsoft powered system provides summaries, not raw search results, and the tool is optimized to work in a narrower set of circumstances. The software has “closer integration and less flexibility,” says one of the programmers, speaking, because they were not authorized by their employer to talk to the media.
Tim Libert, a privacy researcher, claims that he found one exploit in API Bing, was to ask a long list of hospital names to recover URL on the website. Manual search is more troublesome, and “AI’s monstrosity” Microsoft is more complicated than needed, he says.
Mojek, Brave, You.com and Exa belong to companies that still offer tools similar to those that Microsoft retirement. Richard Socher, general director of You.com, says Wired, who has become a significant motor for startup. Colin Hayhurst, general director of Mojek, says “Everything that shakes the search market, is good for his company and wider industry.
But some programmers believe that no option is so solid or rich in functions as API Bing. They indicate that hundreds of search scientists are working on Bing, and the Upstarts have relatively less resources.
When Microsoft moves to cut off access, Google can be forced to open. The technological giant has recently lost an antitrust case submitted by the US Department of Justice, and the federal judge is to order repair activities this year. The requirement to share more search data with competitors is one of the possibilities on the table. Microsoft, who testified that the quality of Bing results was arduous by confined exploit and data, It can be one from the first companies that set up to access.