Microsoft has announced that its search engine, Bing, has passed 100 million daily active users, a landmark achievement for the second most popular search engine in the world. The feat was only possible thanks to the recent introduction of Bing's chat capabilities, which have made waves all over the internet.

If you've missed it, this new version of Bing leverages a dedicated large language model developed by OpenAI, the creators of the popular ChatGPT tool. This language model is specifically optimized for search, and combined with the real-time search capabilities of Bing, it can provide some impressive results. It's still in early preview, and Microsoft has been delivering improvements on a frequent basis, in an attempt to prevent aggressive responses.

Microsoft says there are millions of people using the new Bing preview, which has slowly been expanding to more users. Out of those, one-third is completely new to Bing, which helps illustrate how much of an impact this new version of the search engine has had on its popularity. Microsoft also says engagement with Bing is growing, with users performing more searches more frequently. The mobile version of the new Bing, which includes voice search, has also contributed significantly to Bing's growth. Additionally, 15% of Bing Chat users are asking Bing to generate new content.

One interesting bit of information Microsoft mentioned is that the web search ranking for Bing has "taken several significant jumps in relevancy" thanks to the new language model used. The company says Bing's search results have higher quality than ever before as a result.

This could be very good news for Bing. Even though it's in second place, Microsoft's search engine is nowhere near the popularity of Google, but things are looking up, and with search results going up in quality, that popularity should keep growing in the future. It has to if Microsoft wants to attract advertisers to the platform and make Bing a more profitable business.

Source: Microsoft