Microsoft set to pull the plug on Bing Search APIs in favor of AI alternative

General News
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The Bing Search API is set to be retired on August 11 in favor of AI summaries. Providers such as DuckDuckGo may be impacted by this decision, especially as some of their results rely on Bing Search.

The Bing Search APIs allowed users to add search capabilities to their applications. The latest APIs included image, video, news, and web search.

There are also organizations, such as DuckDuckGo, that source some search results from Bing.

Microsoft confirmed: “Any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned completely, and the product will no longer be available for usage or new customer signup.”

While users with longstanding agreements or contracts with Microsoft, like DuckDuckGo, will reportedly not be immediately affected, the message is clear: stop using the Bing Search APIs and rely on summaries generated by the company’s LLMs.

Microsoft added: “Customers may want to consider Grounding with Bing Search as part of Azure AI Agents. Grounding with Bing Search allows Azure AI Agents to incorporate real-time public web data when generating responses with an LLM.”

The solution may not satisfy customers used to raw search results. It’s also not as if the service was free – Microsoft charged customers for using the APIs, and massively hiked the price in 2023. The increases were as much as 900 percent, depending on a customer’s tier.

Pending an official announcement from DuckDuckGo, they would need to rely on alternatives such as Brave Search API or Mojeek’s Web Search API.

Companies that absorbed the increases at the time now have another decision to make. Without Bing’s search index immediately on tap, the choice is to either select another solution – the Brave Search API or Mojeek’s Web Search API are two options – or accept the AI-powered alternative Microsoft suggests.

While Brave seems to be the logical choice here, do you think DuckDuckGo’s search results will be impacted by this move?

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WTF microsoft really…

On the bright side, DuckDuckGo isn’t affected, but for how long ?

One of the bigger customers that is unaffected for now is the search engine DuckDuckGo, company spokesperson Kamyl Bazbaz confirmed to WIRED. “They’re retiring the self-serve version,” Bazbaz says. Brown says Brave’s understanding is that companies that have inked private and long-term deals with Microsoft will maintain access to the APIs.

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I suspect that this will eventually be a problem once these long-term deals expire.

Not an immediate matter for DuckDuckGo, but a mere future consideration

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What I feel is MS wants to prevent people from self hosting web search enabled AI tools, and potentially shift them towards profitable products.

I doubt if DDG will ever be affected.

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Building with a Microsoft API is a form of ‘building on rented land’ to use an old phrase. You can build a beautiful house, but if the land is rented then you could be in for trouble.

I think the future of alternative search is in entities who built their own search engine from scratch.

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In the current antitrust sphere, it would be weird for them to shun down DDG, but who knows really…

Yes it’s probably the reason but their TOS could be changed to prevent that. This will also affect metasearch engines.

Brave and Mojeek FTW