According to the latest StatCounter statistics, Microsoft’s search engine Bing has surpassed Baidu in the desktop search market share in mainland China, becoming the largest search engine.
According to Statcounter’s data, in the desktop search market in mainland China in April 2023, Microsoft’s Bing search engine surpassed Baidu’s 27.01% market share with 37.4%, marking a historic breakthrough. This news immediately aroused widespread attention and controversy.
Industry insiders have pointed out that although Microsoft’s New Bing combines the powerful capabilities of ChatGPT and Edge browsers, Statcounter’s statistical methods have problems, and there are loopholes in the logic and behavior of crawling. For example, the organization uses tracking codes on its website to collect data, but a large number of Chinese internet websites/apps do not have open interfaces, so the data may have serious errors.
Microsoft launched the new version of Bing in February this year, combining OpenAI’s big language model GPT-3. In just a few weeks, the daily active user count of the new version of Bing quickly exceeded 100 million. The new version of Bing, as the only search engine that integrates artificial intelligence so far, has given Microsoft a first-mover advantage using OpenAI. However, due to data security issues (numerous data breaches and copyright issues caused by ChatGPT), there are very few users in China who can try New Bing. It is not realistic to rely on this ability to drive New Bing’s market share in China.
In addition to ChatGPT’s capabilities, Microsoft has also equipped New Bing with a powerful companion: the Edge browser. However, according to Statcounter’s data, in the global browser market from April 2022 to April 2023, Google Chrome browser continued to dominate with a market share of 66%, while Edge browser had a market share of only 10.73%. Therefore, it remains to be seen whether the Edge browser can provide sufficient support for Bing.
Despite these controversies and issues, the news that Bing has surpassed Baidu in the desktop search market in mainland China has still attracted widespread attention. This is undoubtedly an important milestone for Microsoft and a significant transformation in the Chinese search engine market. Whether Bing can continue to maintain this leading position and expand its market share in the future deserves close attention.
