Microsoft threatens to cut off data from rival AI search engines: Report

Microsoft has threatened to restrict access to its internet-search data that it licenses to rival search engines if they do not stop using it as the basis for their artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, the news agency Bloomberg reported early Saturday (March 25) citing sources. Microsoft licenses the data in its Bing search index, a map of the internet that can be quickly scanned in real-time, to other companies that offer web searches such as Yahoo and DuckDuckGo.

Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT into Bing and its rivals also moved to roll out their artificial intelligence chatbots. This week, Google released its AI product, Bard. DuckDuckGo,which emphasises on protecting searchers' privacy,came up with DuckAssist, which answers questions by scanning a specific set of sources.

Two relatively new search engines You.com and Neeva Inc. also debuted AI-fuelled search services YouChat and NeevaAI. These search chatbots aim to combine the conversational skills of ChatGPT with the information provided by a conventional search engine.

Bloomberg reported on Friday that the regular search engines of DuckDuckGo, You.com and Neeva use Bing to provide some of their information as indexing the entire web is costly.

Sources told the news agency that Microsoft told at least two customers that the use of Bing search index to feed their AI chat tools violates the terms of their contract. They added that Microsoft may terminate licenses providing access to its search index.

The report also said that if they are cut off from the index, smaller search engines would have a hard time finding an alternative. At present, Microsoft and Google are the only two organisations that index the entire web. Google's limitations on the use of its index have led to nearly all other search engines using Microsoft's Bing.

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