Make a Killing
To Bing users out there — don’t all jump up at once — Microsoft is offering the chance to win $1,000,000.
Such is the tech giant’s desperate attempt to shake up its search engine’s role as an extremely distant second fiddle to Google. There’s not only a main prize of a million bucks up for grabs, but also $10,000 for another ten winners.
The competition started last month and — lucky you — there’s still time to enter, though you’ll have to be a resident of the US, Canada, UK, France, or Germany for a chance to win.
Enter with your Microsoft account and complete little quests like setting Bing as your default search engine, or downloading the Bing app, or doing all sorts of other Bing-things to increase your odds of winning. And hell, why not? It’s not like Google and its blundering AI Overviews make for all that amazing of a search engine these days.
Uphill Battle
Microsoft’s efforts to topple Google Search have been comically Sisyphean in their futility. Bing launched in 2009, and since then, Google’s market share of the search engine space more or less hasn’t budged from 90 percent globally.
With that dominance, Google also reaps about 50 percent of US search advertising, adding to a whopping total of $175 billion global search revenues in 2023.
Microsoft, meanwhile, might consider it cause for celebration when its search market share goes from 2.8 percent to 3.4, as it did between 2023 and 2024.
And to its credit, it did make a dent — or at least a divot — with its early Bing AI ChatGPT integration efforts, giving what felt like the first time Microsoft got a leg up on Google Search pretty much ever.
Suddenly the tech industry believed Google could bleed, and using chatbots that could supplant conventional search engines — and thereby Google’s biggest cash cow — was how they’d draw blood.
Money to Burn
That underdog story hasn’t quite panned out yet. Google remains the all-powerful Big Bad, and for all of the newfangled AI features stuffed into Bing (now shelved under the Copilot label), it hasn’t resulted in a significant bump in Microsoft’s search market share.
As of this month, Bing accounts for 4.15 percent globally, according to StatCounter.
So, when all else fails, why not literally pay people money out the wazoo to use your product? It’s certainly not everyday that Microsoft does a giveaway this big. Either it’s that desperate, or just embarrassingly flush with cash; after all, the million dollar prize is just one-seventy-ninth of its CEO’s pay package!
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