Bing Might Shut Down - Just Like Skype Did - Some Time in the Coming Months/Years (Parts of It Already Shut Down)
This month's data (published for the previous month on week 2 of every month):
At risk of repeating ourselves: 1) Bing is not gaining, in many ways it is shrinking; 2) chatbots or "Bing Chat" or whatever (they did a rebrand/ing each time it failed) didn't fix (1) and 3) Bing is financially problematic, it already has mass layoffs, and there's no turnaround foreseen because even Yandex will soon surpass it in market share.
So Bing is basically a "dead-man-walking", just like Skype was. It's a money furnace, not a mere stalemate. This week, as the axes drop, we learn that "Microsoft Cuts Off Access to Bing Search Data" and the go-to excuse is 'hey hi' (which also experiences cuts). To quote:
Microsoft quietly announced earlier this week that it plans to shut down a long-standing tool supplying search engine startups and other software developers with a raw feed of Bing search results. The Bing Search APIs, or application programming interfaces, were once vital to many niche Google alternatives, but fell out of favor more recently as Microsoft hiked fees for the service and restricted its use.
They will not shut down Bing overnight; they try to bring the losses under control. Having just run a random search in Bing, I see that for a query that returns/yields no results they only serve me with a large ad (despite me blocking ads). As noted this morning, "Microsoft Advertising is closing its demand-side platform", so one can link the failure of Bing to the failure of the ad business. █