Who would have imagined just a few months ago, that Microsoft would oppose the use of Bing search results by other search services? Betting on it at the time would make us millionaires today because it was almost unthinkable. But it makes perfect sense today, although it’s possible that stakeholders were more than surprised by Redmond’s move. But let’s start from the beginning, i.e. by clarifying which rivals are involved and the reasons that led Microsoft to such an action.

That the pie of information seekers on the Internet largely belongs to Google It’s something we all know and we also know that there are other services of this type, with Bing at the head of the competition it’s also not a surprise to anyone. What a lot of people don’t know, even though it’s not a secret, it is some third-party search engines use Google and/or Bing search resultsto which they later apply their own functions, filters and so on.

Search services such as You (which has recently become very popular), DuckDuckGo, Neeva or Yahoo! Search (yes, Yahoo! has its “own” search engine), among other things, when we use them to search, they do the same thing in Bing and later offer us the results along with their personalization layer. In this way, these companies can provide personalized search services without having to manage their own Internet indexing system, which is extremely complex and expensive.

However, that may change, according to what we can read in Bloomberg Microsoft would contact some of these companies to tell them they could be left without access to Bing And of course this way without its main tool to serve its users the search results they want to perform. Quite a blow that could fatally affect their chances of survival.

And why is Microsoft considering “turning off the tap” and who does it want to turn off? Bloomberg’s information doesn’t point to any service specifically, but focuses on why Redmond would act this way, and it’s none other than the inclusion of artificial intelligence assistance functions in these servicessomething that would go against their own interests with the brand new Bing with Prometheus.

So, for example, of the four services I listed above, only Yahoo! Search would get rid of this Microsoft measure because You, DuckDuckGo, Neeva announced and deployed AI-based features. So the big question is how will they act, will they be willing to give up using AI-based features, or will they stop using Bing as a search results provider? It’s obviously a very difficult decision, so we’ll have to see how they decide, as well as what Microsoft’s next steps are.