Microsoft Bing API Price Hike Threatens the Future of Search

UNITED KINGDOM, May 2:Changes to the price of Microsoft Bing’s application programming interface (API), which provides search results for a range of well-known alternative search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, Yahoo! and Ecosia, threaten the future of many of Microsoft’s search partners and competitors. From 1st May 2023, there will be significant increases to the costs incurred by those using any Bing API products: search, images, news, videos, visual, entity, spell check and autosuggest. Costs per query are going up as much as 10x in some cases. The lowest price Web Search costs will rise from $3 per thousand queries, to $15. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft also told two unnamed search engines that it doesn’t want their chatbots to leverage its index in March, threatening to remove their API access. Companies wishing to use Bing API results alongside their own Large Language Model will have to pay higher prices; at least $28 per thousand queries, with a dramatic increase to $200 per thousand for more than 1 million requests per day. To justify these massive price increases, the Microsoft Bing Search API webpage states: “We periodically assess the value and pricing of our services to meet market demands and align the pricing of our products and services with customer consumption trends and preferences. The new pricing model reflects more accurately the technology investments Bing continues to make to improve Search.” Colin Hayhurst, CEO of non-tracking search engine, www.mojeek.com, stated: “Though we are deeply concerned by this move by Microsoft, we have been anticipating it. As a UK -based but international and authentically-independent search engine, Mojeek is a genuine alternative to Bing. As a result, we have seen a significant increase in interest for our own web search API.” “With a unique and proprietary search index of nearly 7-billion pages we can provide search data for use in metasearch engines, as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. We stand ready to help those organisations that cannot afford these unjustified price hikes by providing them with a fairly-priced API,” continued Hayhurst. “By increasing the API prices to such a degree, Microsoft has decided pick to a fight with Google through changing the form of their search duopoly. Until now, Microsoft had been content to challenge Google through Bing API partners like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and Yahoo! Now these companies are being exploited for profit, and neutered in their efforts to develop products that challenge Bing Chat and GPT from their new partner OpenAI.” “The Bing price changes will adversely affect search engines which do not have their own search indexes, traditionally referred to as metasearch engines or search proxies. The ease of using Bing’s API has created a range of different metasearch engines which all depend upon Bing but offer extra functionality. Those focusing on protecting user privacy, such as in the case of DuckDuckGo and Qwant; and navigators which use ad revenues for charitable causes, such as Ecosia and Lilo, will all be affected. These options, which in most cases use Microsoft’s advertising network to generate revenue, will have to look elsewhere for results, find other ways of making money off their offerings or close altogether,” concluded Hayhurst. The price hike is part of a broader trend in the tech industry, as companies that have large datasets move to further profit from their data and services, sometimes suppressing the ecosystems that they both feed and benefit from. Another recent example is Twitter who haves moved to an expensive paid API, affecting third-party Twitter apps such as Tweetbot and Fenix. Reddit have also recently updated the Developer Terms of their API, clarifying restrictions on using “User Content for ... purposes, such as for training a machine learning or artificial intelligence model.”