Since Adding ChatGPT, Bing’s App Grew Almost As Much As All Last Year

Last year, Bing’s mobile app had just 800,000 downloads. But in the week since Bing announced a integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, people have downloaded the Bing mobile app more than 750,000 times, peaking at over 150,000 installs a day.

Apparently, going viral works, even if you’re a massive global software giant like Microsoft.

“I’m not at all surprised by this,” says Appfigures CEO Ariel Michaeli, whose company reported the data. “There’s lots of excitement around ChatGPT right now and while it is free to access, it’s almost always unavailable unless you have a premium account.”

Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI and Bing’s integration with ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize search by providing detailed, contextual answers to search queries, rather than links to possible answers. While there are clearly issues with both the cost of providing this kind of answer and the fact that this new technology is in some cases providing “unhinged,” factually wrong, or even angry responses to questions and conversations, there’s something qualitatively new about getting human-sounding answers and responses from generative AI-powered answer-providing systems.

And that’s driving consumer interest and — perhaps — search engine market share changes.

According to StatCounter, Google remains the undisputed heavyweight champion of the search engine wars, with a near-monopolistic 93% share of global searches. Bing hovers around 3% of global share, and Yahoo!, Yandex, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo take the slivers the remain. (To insert a small grain of salt into these statistics, Google does not operate in China, where Baidu is the search leader, so Google’s lead is likely largest in English and in Western countries, and not as large globally as StatCounter reports.)

When your competitor outscores you 93% to 3%, anything you can can do to change the results is welcome, which is why Microsoft is bringing new technology to the search engine fight.

The challenge: virality is often short-lived.

So while there was a flood of new Bing users downloading its mobile app, those are probably mostly early adopters hoping to test the new technology. And that initial flood has eased to more of a trickle, as Bing app installs dropped from over 150,000 on February 8 to under 50,000 on February 14.

“The real question still remains – is search better with a smart answering service?” asks Michaeli.

That really remains to be seen.

Google’s rushed announcement for its version of the ChatGPT technology, called Bard, included an error which investors took as a bad sign for Google’s AI proficiency. They punished the company’s stock, driving Alphabet stock down 8% in a single day.

The most likely scenario is that both Google and Bing — and others — figure out how to make generative AI answer technology work better over the next few years, which requires both providing better (and safer) answers, and achieving this at an acceptable per-query cost.

Which would result in a better search user experience … even if the resulting technology professes love for you and tries to break up your marriage.