The search category is about fair use

There was a very interesting interview with Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, published on The Verge discussing integration of AI into MS products including Bing search engine and its Edge browser. Bing currently has a very small share of the search market, approximately 4% in the UK and 6% in the US. Microsoft seem quite confident that this could be their moment, they’ve beaten Google to launch a very innovative and well-integrated AI product into their search engine and browser. They really have done a very good job with it.

The interview with Satya Nadella is interesting because in it he discusses the importance of the new AI chat feature in sending traffic back to websites: “The search category is about fair use so that we can generate traffic back to publishers….Our bots are not going to be allowed to crawl search if we are not driving traffic.” According to Satya, they will be monitoring the traffic being sent out to websites and it will be interesting to see how, over time, the level of traffic to websites is impacted by the new chat tools. Ultimately, if publishers don’t get the traffic then they won’t be investing in new content. The AI needs content to learn, publishers need money and Microsoft needs to keep things relevant and display ads. Interesting times ahead!

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