They promised us that AI was going to change everything. Even that he was going to retire the search engines. But for now, it seems that is not the case. At least, in the case of bing. Microsoft was confident that the integration of ChatGPT would help close the gap with the Google search engine, but that is not what has happened. It has even lost market share, compared to 2022.
StatCounter has published the usage figures of the search engines as we arrive in 2023Worldwide:
Globally, Bing had a market share of 3.59% in October 2022, before the arrival of artificial intelligence. In October 2023, months after the ChatGPT integration, it has… 3.11%.
As we see, The Google search engine continues to monopolize the search engine market with an incredible share of 91.55%. Behind Bing are Yandex, Yahoo! and Baidu, which barely exceed 1%. DuckDuckGo, the most privacy-respecting browser on the list, barely reaches 0.5%.
Artificial intelligence does not change anything in search engines
You might think that since ChatGPT has had more penetration in the United States, things could change there. But the numbers are even worse.
In October 2022, Bing had a market share in the United States of 7.4%, and in October 2023 it dropped to 6.89%.
If you are curious about the figures in Spain, a year ago Bing reached 3.25%. In October 2023, it drops to 2.8%. Google maintains 95.82% of the market, and Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and Yandex do not even reach 1%.
When Microsoft announced with great fanfare the integration of ChatGPT into Bing at the beginning of the year, many spoke of a revolution. Artificial intelligence was going to “kill” classic search engines, and even Google’s search engine would be surpassed in two years.
At the moment, that is not the case. AI has not changed the market share of search engines at all. In the case of Bing, it has even gone down. After the initial “boom”, ChatGPT and company have hit the brakes. They have lost customers and are having trouble making profits, due to the high cost of maintaining servers.
The causes are varied. From the rejection of AI by those who fear losing their jobs, to copyright and privacy problems, and the fact that to take advantage of AI, you have to pay a monthly fee.
We are convinced that Artificial intelligence will end up dominating all technological fields, including search engines. But it is not going to be as fast as Microsoft anticipated. The misfortune for them is that they have lost a year of advantage with Google.
