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Microsoft to block AI rivals from accessing Bing Search Index to power their AI chatbot

Intro: Microsoft is reportedly to block AI rivals from accessing Bing Search Index. Two customers who used Bing search Indexes with AI chat tools violated the terms of their contracts, thereby denying access to the index if they use it as the foundation for competing AI chatbots.

Microsoft Corp licenses the Bing search index to several Search engines including DuckDuckGo and Yahoo search engines. The company does not want its competitors to use Bing’s search index to power their artificial intelligence chatbots. DuckDuckGo has recently launched its own GPT-based Chatbot, while it is unclear which search engines have been warned. “We have been in touch with partners who are out of compliance as we continue to consistently enforce our terms across the board,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Bloomberg. “We will continue to work with them directly and provide any information needed to find a path forward.”

According to reports, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft may also reportedly terminate licenses for access to its search engine. The company has recently introduced AI-generated stories that allow users to consume bite-sized information via text, images, video, and audio. Bing chat has an image creator tool and also supports visual stories and updated knowledge cards. The reports of Microsoft denying access to Bing search index is misusing Bing’s data which is a branch of contract and that it may choose to terminate its agreement with the search engines accused of misusing the information. Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google are the only two companies that index the entire web, and Google’s restrictions on how its index can be used have driven nearly all other search engines to use Bing. Microsoft licenses that data in Bing Search Index to other companies that provide web search, including DuckDuckGo, Apollo Global Management’s Yahoo, and the AI search engine You.com. They use Bing to provide some of their information since indexing the entire web is expensive and requires servers to store data. These platforms also launched AI-powered search services to combine ChatGPT’s conversational abilities with the information provided by a traditional search engine. With more companies, such as Google, releasing their versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, Microsoft is likely looking to make its search data exclusive to Bing’s chatbot. The tool is already powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4.