Microsoft brings Bing to ChatGPT as default search engine

SAN FRANSISCO: Microsoft has announced the integration of Bing Search into OpenAI’s ChatGPT in order to provide more relevant and potentially new responses.

Bing will serve as the “default search experience”, allowing ChatGPT to retrieve answers from the internet and provide citations.

“I’m pleased to announce we are bringing Bing to ChatGPT as the default search experience,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of consumer marketing, said in a blogpost on Tuesday.

“ChatGPT will now have a world-class search engine built-in to provide timelier and more up-to-date answers with access from the web,” he added.

Moreover, the company said that this new experience is now rolling out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and will be available to free users soon by simply enabling a plugin which brings Bing to ChatGPT.

ChatGPT previously relied solely on individual plugins to access any recent information.

The other new Bing updates are focused on plugins, such as a single platform for developers to create and submit plugins for ChatGPT, Bing, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and others.

Bing will be adding its in-chat plugin options to include Expedia (a US-based engineering firm), Zillow (a US-based real estate company), and Klarna (a Swedish fintech company) for targeted communication on topics such as travel and shopping.

The common plugin platform will also be natively integrated into Microsoft Edge, which already has Bing built in.