Microsoft‘s Bing search engine is turning 15 years old today! While Bing itself launched in 2009, it has roots that go much deeper, tracing back to earlier search products like MSN Search (1998), Windows Live Search (2006), and Live Search (2007).

In a LinkedIn post, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of search and AI, Jordi Ribas, reflected on Bing’s journey. “Bing is 15 today,” he wrote, “and it’s got me thinking about what Bing has done for search, the tech industry, and society.”

Ribas acknowledges that Bing’s quest to stand out in the search market has had “mixed success.” But he believes Bing’s overall impact has been positive. As an example, he highlights the integration of Microsoft’s Copilot, a powerful AI tool, into Bing. This move, he argues, has pushed competitors to develop similar functionalities, ultimately benefiting users.

Another positive contribution Ribas points to is the Microsoft Rewards program. As of April 2024, the program has facilitated the donation of over $20.6 million to charities, empowering users to support causes they care about.

However, according to Ribas, Bing’s most significant contribution lies in its role as a “grounding force” for large language models (LLMs) like Copilot. LLMs are AI systems capable of generating human-quality text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions.

“The combination of real-time information from Bing search grounding (RAG) with LLMs is what delivers the freshest, most accurate chat responses,” explains Ribas.

Interestingly, he argues that LLMs, rather than replacing search engines, actually make them more important than ever. This is why companies like OpenAI, Meta, and others have licensed Bing’s search API for their own chatbots. Bing’s search capabilities, it seems, are playing a vital role in ensuring the accuracy and effectiveness of these AI-powered chat experiences.