A keystone species is a species that has a disproportionately large effect on its natural environment relative to its abundance. The concept was introduced in 1969 by the zoologist Robert T. Paine. Keystone species play a critical role in maintaining the structure of an ecological community, affecting many other organisms in an ecosystem
and helping to determine the types and numbers of various other species
in the community. Without keystone species, the ecosystem would be
dramatically different or cease to exist altogether. Some keystone
species, such as the wolf and lion, are also apex predators.
The role that a keystone species plays in its ecosystem is analogous to the role of a keystone in an arch.
While the keystone is under the least pressure of any of the stones in
an arch, the arch still collapses without it. Similarly, an ecosystem
may experience a dramatic shift if a keystone species is removed, even
though that species was a small part of the ecosystem by measures of biomass or productivity.
It became a popular concept in conservation biology, alongside flagship and umbrella species.
Although the concept is valued as a descriptor for particularly strong
inter-species interactions, and has allowed easier communication between
ecologists and conservation policy-makers, it has been criticized for
oversimplifying complex ecological systems.
The concept of the keystone species was introduced in 1969 by zoologist Robert T. Paine. Paine developed the concept to explain his observations and experiments on the relationships between marine invertebrates of the intertidal zone (between the high and low tide lines), including starfish and mussels. He removed the starfish from an area, and documented the effects on the ecosystem. In his 1966 paper, Food Web Complexity and Species Diversity, Paine had described such a system in Makah Bay in Washington.
In his 1969 paper, Paine proposed the keystone species concept, using Pisaster ochraceus, a species of starfish generally known as ochre starfish, and Mytilus californianus, a species of mussel, as a primary example.
The ochre starfish is a generalist predator and feeds on chitons,
limpets, snails, barnacles, echinoids, and even decapod crustacea. The
favourite food for these starfish is the mussel which is a dominant
competitor for the space on the rocks. The ochre starfish keeps the
population numbers of the mussels in check along with the other preys
allowing the other seaweeds, sponges, and anemones, that ochre starfish
do not consume, to co-exist. When Paine removed the ochre starfish, the
mussels quickly outgrew the other species crowding them out. At the
start, the rock pools held 15 rock-clinging species. Three years later
there were 8 such species; and ten years later the pools were largely
occupied by a single species, mussels. The concept became popular in
conservation, and was deployed in a range of contexts and mobilized to
engender support for conservation, especially where human activities had
damaged ecosystems, such as by removing keystone predators.
Definitions
A keystone species was defined by Paine as a species that has a disproportionately large effect on its environment relative to its abundance. It has been defined operationally by Davic in 2003 as "a strongly interacting species whose top-down effect on species diversity and competition is large relative to its biomass dominance within a functional group."
A classic keystone species is a predator that prevents a particular herbivorous species from eliminating dominant plant
species. If prey numbers are low, keystone predators can be even less
abundant and still be effective. Yet without the predators, the
herbivorous prey would explode in numbers, wipe out the dominant plants,
and dramatically alter the character of the ecosystem. The exact
scenario changes in each example, but the central idea remains that
through a chain of interactions, a non-abundant species has an outsized
impact on ecosystem functions. For example, the herbivorous weevilEuhrychiopsis lecontei is thought to have keystone effects on aquatic plant diversity by foraging on nuisance Eurasian watermilfoil in North American waters. Similarly, the wasp species Agelaia vicina
has been labeled a keystone species for its unparalleled nest size,
colony size, and high rate of brood production. The diversity of its
prey and the quantity necessary to sustain its high rate of growth have a
direct impact on other species around it.
The keystone concept is defined by its ecological effects, and
these in turn make it important for conservation. In this it overlaps
with several other species conservation concepts such as flagship species, indicator species, and umbrella species. For example, the jaguar is a charismatic big cat which meets all of these definitions:
The jaguar is an umbrella species,
flagship species, and wilderness quality indicator. It promotes the
goals of carnivore recovery, protecting and restoring connectivity
through Madrean woodland and riparian areas, and protecting and
restoring riparian areas. ... A reserve system that protects jaguars is
an umbrella for many other species. ... the jaguar [is] a keystone in
subtropical and tropical America ...
The sea otter is an important predator of sea urchins, making it a keystone species for the kelp forests.
Sea otters protect kelp forests
from damage by sea urchins. When the sea otters of the North American
west coast were hunted commercially for their fur, their numbers fell to
such low levels – fewer than 1000 in the north Pacific ocean – that
they were unable to control the sea urchin population. The urchins, in
turn, grazed the holdfasts of kelp
so heavily that the kelp forests largely disappeared, along with all
the species that depended on them. Reintroducing the sea otters has
enabled the kelp ecosystem to be restored. For example, in Southeast
Alaska some 400 sea otters were released, and they have bred to form a
population approaching 25,000.
The wolf, Yellowstone's apex predator
Riparian willow recovery at Blacktail Creek, Yellowstone National Park, showing effect of the reintroduction of wolves
Keystone predators may increase the biodiversity
of communities by preventing a single species from becoming dominant.
They can have a profound influence on the balance of organisms in a
particular ecosystem.
Introduction or removal of a keystone predator, or changes in its
population density, can have drastic cascading effects on the
equilibrium of many other populations in the ecosystem. For example,
grazers of a grassland may prevent a single dominant species from taking
over.
The elimination of the gray wolf from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem had profound impacts on the trophic pyramid.
Without predation, herbivores began to over-graze many woody browse
species, affecting the area's plant populations. In addition, wolves
often kept animals from grazing in riparian areas, which protected
beavers from having their food sources encroached upon. The removal of
wolves had a direct effect on beaver populations, as their habitat
became grazing territory. Increased browsing on willows and conifers
along Blacktail Creek due to a lack of predation caused channel incision
because the beavers helped slow the water down, allowing soil to stay
in place. Furthermore, predation keeps hydrological features such as
creeks and streams in normal working order. When wolves were
reintroduced, the beaver population and the whole riparian ecosystem
recovered dramatically within a few years.
Sea stars and other non-apex predators
As described by Paine in 1966, some sea stars (e.g., Pisaster ochraceus) may prey on sea urchins, mussels, and other shellfish that have no other natural predators. If the sea star is removed from the ecosystem, the mussel population explodes uncontrollably, driving out most other species.
The jaguar, whose numbers in Central and South America have been classified as near threatened, acts as a keystone predator by its widely varied diet, helping to balance the mammalian jungle ecosystem with its consumption of 87 different species of prey. The lion is another keystone species.
Keystone
mutualists are organisms that participate in mutually beneficial
interaction, the loss of which would have a profound impact upon the
ecosystem as a whole. For example, in the Avon Wheatbelt region of Western Australia, there is a period of each year when Banksia prionotes (acorn banksia) is the sole source of nectar for honeyeaters, which play an important role in pollination
of numerous plant species. Therefore, the loss of this one species of
tree would probably cause the honeyeater population to collapse, with
profound implications for the entire ecosystem. Another example is frugivores, such as the cassowary, which spreads the seeds of many different trees. Some seeds will not grow unless they have been through a cassowary.
A term used alongside keystone is ecosystem engineer. In North America, the prairie dog is an ecosystem engineer. Prairie dog burrows provide the nesting areas for mountain plovers and burrowing owls. Prairie dog tunnel systems also help channel rainwater into the water table to prevent runoff and erosion, and can also serve to change the composition of the soil in a region by increasing aeration
and reversing soil compaction that can be a result of cattle grazing.
Prairie dogs also trim the vegetation around their colonies, perhaps to
remove any cover for predators. Grazing species such as plains bison, which is another keystone species, the pronghorn, and the mule deer have shown a proclivity for grazing on the same land used by prairie dogs.
Beaver dam, an animal construction which has a transformative effect on the environment
The beaver
is a well known ecosystem engineer and keystone species. It transforms
its territory from a stream to a pond or swamp. Beavers affect the
environment first altering the edges of riparian
areas by cutting down older trees to use for their dams. This allows
younger trees to take their place. Beaver dams alter the riparian area
they are established in. Depending on topography, soils, and many
factors, these dams change the riparian edges of streams and rivers into
wetlands, meadows, or riverine forests. These dams have been shown to
be beneficial to a myriad of species including amphibians, salmon, and
song birds.
In the African savanna, the larger herbivores, especially the elephants,
shape their environment. The elephants destroy trees, making room for
the grass species and creating habitat for various small animal species. Without these animals, much of the savanna would turn into woodland.
In the Amazon river basin, peccaries produce and maintain wallows that are utilized by a wide variety of species.
Australian studies have found that parrotfish on the Great Barrier Reef
are the only reef fish that consistently scrape and clean the coral on
the reef. Without these animals, the Great Barrier Reef would be under
severe strain.
In the Serengeti, the presence of sufficient gnus in these grasslands reduces wildfire likelihood, which in turn promotes tree growth. The documentary The Serengeti Rules documents this in detail.
Limitations
Depends on context
The
community ecologist Bruce Menge states that the keystone concept has
been stretched far beyond Paine's original concept. That stretching can
be quantified: the researcher Ishana Shukla has listed 230 species
identified as keystones in some 157 studies in the 50 years since
Paine's paper. Menge's own work has shown that the purple Pisaster
sea star that Paine had studied was a powerful keystone species in
places exposed to strong wave action, but was far less important in
sheltered places. Paine had indeed stated that in Alaska, without the
relevant mussel species as prey, the predatory Pisaster was "just
another sea star". In other words, the extent to which a species could
be described as a keystone depended on the ecological context.
Multiple meanings
Although
the concept of the keystone species has a value in describing
particularly strong inter-species interactions, and for allowing easier
communication between ecologists and conservation policy-makers, it has
been criticized by L. S. Mills and colleagues for oversimplifying
complex ecological systems. The term has been applied widely in
different ecosystems and to predators, prey, and plants (primary
producers), inevitably with differing ecological meanings. For instance,
removing a predator may allow other animals to increase to the point
where they wipe out other species; removing a prey species may cause
predator populations to crash, or may allow predators to drive other
prey species to extinction; and removing a plant species may result in
the loss of animals that depend on it, like pollinators
and seed dispersers. Beavers too have been called keystone, not for
eating other species but for modifying the environment in ways that
affected other species. The term has thus been given quite different
meanings in different cases. In Mills's view, Paine's work showed that a
few species could sometimes have extremely strong interactions within a
particular ecosystem, but that does not automatically imply that other
ecosystems have a similar structure.
In horticulture, the term (per- + -ennial, "through the year") is used to differentiate a plant from shorter-lived annuals and biennials. It has thus been defined as a plant that lives more than 2 years.
The term is also loosely used to distinguish plants with little or no
woody growth (secondary growth in girth) from trees and shrubs, which
are also technically perennials.
Notably, it is estimated that 94% of plant species fall under the
category of perennials, underscoring the prevalence of plants with
lifespans exceeding two years in the botanical world.
Perennials (especially small flowering plants) that grow and bloom over the spring and summer, die back every autumn and winter, and then return in the spring from their rootstock or other overwintering structure, are known as herbaceous perennials.
However, depending on the rigours of the local climate (temperature,
moisture, organic content in the soil, microorganisms), a plant that is a
perennial in its native habitat, may be treated by a gardener as an
annual and planted out every year, from seed, from cuttings, or from
divisions. Tomato vines, for example, live several years in their
natural tropical/ subtropical habitat but are grown as annuals in temperate regions because their above-ground biomass does not survive the winter.
There is also a class of evergreen perennials which lack woody stems, such as Bergenia which retain a mantle of leaves throughout the year. An intermediate class of plants is known as subshrubs, which retain a vestigial woody structure in winter, e.g. Penstemon.
Perennial
plants can be short-lived (only a few years) or long-lived. They
include a wide assortment of plant groups from non-flowering plants like
ferns and liverworts to highly diverse flowering plants like orchids, grasses, and woody plants. Plants that flower and fruit only once and then die are termed monocarpic or semelparous; these species may live for many years before they flower. For example, a century plant can live for 80 years and grow 30 meters tall before flowering and dying. However, most perennials are polycarpic (or iteroparous), flowering over many seasons in their lifetime.
Perennials invest more resources than annuals into roots, crowns, and
other structures that allow them to live from one year to the next. They
often have a competitive advantage because they can commence their
growth and leaf out earlier in the growing season, and can grow taller
than annuals. In doing so they can better compete for space and collect
more light.
Perennials typically grow structures that allow them to adapt to living from one year to the next through a form of vegetative reproduction rather than seeding. These structures include bulbs, tubers, woody crowns, rhizomes, turions, woody stems, or crowns which allows them to survive periods of dormancy over cold or dry seasons; these structures typically store carbohydrates which are used once the dormancy period is over and new growth begins. In climates that are warm all year long, perennials may grow continuously. Annuals
which complete their life cycle in one growing season, in contrast with
perennials, produce seeds as the next generation and die; the seeds may survive cold or dry periods or germinate soon after dispersal depending on the climate.
Some perennials retain their foliage year-round; these are evergreen perennials. Deciduous perennials shed all their leaves part of the year.
Deciduous perennials include herbaceous and woody plants; herbaceous
plants have stems that lack hard, fibrous growth, while woody plants
have stems with buds that survive above ground during dormancy. Some perennials are semi-deciduous, meaning they lose some of their leaves in either winter or summer.
Deciduous perennials shed their leaves when growing conditions are no
longer suitable for photosynthesis, such as when it is too cold or dry.
In many parts of the world, seasonality is expressed as wet and dry
periods rather than warm and cold periods, and deciduous perennials lose
their leaves in the dry season.
Some perennial plants are protected from wildfires because they have underground roots that produce adventitious shoots, bulbs, crowns, or stems; other perennials like trees and shrubs may have thick cork layers that protect the stems. Herbaceous perennials from temperate and alpine regions of the world can tolerate the cold during winter.
Perennial plants may remain dormant for long periods and then
recommence growth and reproduction when the environment is more
suitable, while most annual plants complete their life cycle during one
growing period, and biennials have two growing periods.
The meristem
of perennial plants communicates with the hormones produced due to
environmental situations (i.e., seasons), reproduction, and stage of
development to begin and halt the ability to grow or flower. There is
also a distinction between the ability to grow and the actual task of
growth. For example, most trees regain the ability to grow during winter
but do not initiate physical growth until the spring and summer months.
The start of dormancy can be seen in perennial plants through withering
flowers, loss of leaves on trees, and halting of reproduction in both
flowering and budding plants.
Perennial species may produce relatively large seeds that have the advantage of generating larger seedlings that can better compete with other plants. Perennials also produce seeds over many years.
An important aspect of cold acclimation is overexpression of DNA repair genes. In Thinopyrum intermedium a perennial relative of common wheat Triticum aestivum,
conditions of freezing stress were shown to be associated with large
increases in expression of two DNA repair genes (one gene product a photolyase and the other, a protein involved in nucleotide excision repair).
Cultivation
Perennials that are cultivated include: woody plants like fruit trees grown for their edible fruits; shrubs and trees grown as landscaping ornamentals; herbaceous food crops like asparagus, rhubarb, strawberries; and subtropical plants not hardy in colder areas such as tomatoes, eggplant, and coleus (which are treated as annuals in colder areas).
Perennials also include plants grown for their flowering and other
ornamental value including bulbs (like tulips, narcissus, and
gladiolus); lawn grass, and other groundcovers, (such as periwinkle and Dichondra).
Each type of plant must be separated differently; for example,
plants with fibrous root systems like daylilies, Siberian iris, or
grasses can be pried apart with two garden forks inserted back to back,
or cut by knives. However, plants such as bearded irises have a root
system of rhizomes; these root systems should be planted with the top of
the rhizome just above ground level, with leaves from the following
year showing. The point of dividing perennials is to increase the amount
of a single breed of plant in your garden. In the United States more than 900 million dollars worth of potted herbaceous perennial plants were sold in 2019.
Dahlia
plants are tender perennials that originate from climates that are warm
all year round and need special care to survive cold winters.
Benefits in agriculture
Switchgrass is a deep-rooted perennial. These roots are more than 3 meters long.
Although most of humanity is fed by the re-sowing of the seeds of annual grain crops, (either naturally or by the manual efforts of humans), perennial crops provide numerous benefits. Perennial plants often have deep, extensive root systems which can hold soil to prevent erosion, capture dissolved nitrogen before it can contaminate ground and surface water, and out-compete weeds (reducing the need for herbicides). These potential benefits of perennials have resulted in new attempts to increase the seed yield of perennial species, which could result in the creation of new perennial grain crops. Some examples of new perennial crops being developed are perennial rice and intermediate wheatgrass.
A perennial rice developed in 2018, was reported in 2023, to have
provided a similar yield to replanted annual rice when evaluated over
eight consecutive harvests.
Location
Perennial plants dominate many natural ecosystems on land and in fresh water, with only a very few (e.g. Zostera) occurring in shallow sea water. Herbaceous perennial plants are particularly dominant in conditions too fire-prone for trees and shrubs, e.g., most plants on prairies and steppes are perennials; they are also dominant on tundra too cold for tree growth. Nearly all forest plants are perennials, including trees and shrubs.
Perennial plants are usually better long-term competitors,
especially under stable, resource-poor conditions. This is due to the
development of larger root
systems which can access water and soil nutrients deeper in the soil
and to earlier emergence in the spring. Annual plants have an advantage
in disturbed environments because of their faster growth and
reproduction rates.
Many vegetable plants can grow as perennials in tropical climates, but die in cold weather. Examples of some of the more completely perennial vegetables are:
Microsoft Bing (also known simply as Bing) is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft.
The service traces its roots back to Microsoft's earlier search
engines, including MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search.
Bing offers a broad spectrum of search services, encompassing web, video, image, and map search products, all developed using ASP.NET.
The transition from Live Search to Bing was announced by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009, at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, California.
The official release followed on June 3, 2009. Bing introduced several
notable features at its inception, such as search suggestions during
query input and a list of related searches, known as the 'Explore pane'.
These features leveraged semantic technology from Powerset, a company Microsoft acquired in 2008. Microsoft also struck a deal with Yahoo! that led to Bing powering Yahoo! Search.
Microsoft made significant strides towards open-source technology in 2016, making the BitFunnelsearch engine indexing algorithm and various components of Bing open source. In February 2023, Microsoft launched Bing Chat (later renamed Microsoft Copilot), an artificial intelligencechatbot experience based on GPT-4,
integrated directly into the search engine. This was well-received,
with Bing reaching 100 million active users by the following month.
As of April 2024, Bing holds the position of the second-largest search engine worldwide, with a market share of 3.64%, behind Google's 90.91%. Other competitors include Yandex with 1.61%, Baidu with 1.15%, and Yahoo!, which is largely powered by Bing, with 1.13%.
History
Background (1998–2009)
MSN Search
MSN Search homepage in 2002MSN Search homepage in 2006
Microsoft launched MSN Search in the third quarter of 1998, using search results from Inktomi. It consisted of a search engine, index, and web crawler. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. Microsoft decided to make a large investment in web search by building its own web crawler for MSN Search, the index of which was updated weekly and sometimes daily. The upgrade started as a beta program in November 2004, and came out of beta in February 2005. This occurred a year after rival Yahoo! Search rolled out its own crawler. Image search was powered by a third party, Picsearch.
The service also started providing its search results to other search
engine portals in an effort to better compete in the market.
Windows Live Search
Windows Live Search homepage
The first public beta of Windows Live Search was unveiled on
March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006 replacing
MSN Search. The new search engine used search tabs that include Web,
news, images, music, desktop, local, and Microsoft Encarta.
In the roll-over from MSN Search to Windows Live Search,
Microsoft stopped using Picsearch as their image search provider and
started performing their own image search, fueled by their own internal
image search algorithms.
Live Search
Live Search homepage, which would help to create the Bing homepage later on
On March 21, 2007, Microsoft announced that it would separate its search developments from the Windows Live services family, rebranding the service as Live Search. Live Search was integrated into the Live Search and Ad Platform headed by Satya Nadella, part of Microsoft's Platform and Systems division. As part of this change, Live Search was merged with Microsoft adCenter.
A series of reorganizations and consolidations of Microsoft's
search offerings were made under the Live Search branding. On May 23,
2008, Microsoft discontinued Live Search Books and Live Search Academic and integrated all academic and book search results into regular search. This also included the closure of the Live Search Books Publisher Program. Windows Live Expo
was discontinued on July 31, 2008. Live Search Macros, a service for
users to create their own custom search engines or use macros created by
other users, was also discontinued. On May 15, 2009, Live Product Upload, a service which allowed merchants to upload products information onto Live Search Products, was discontinued. The final reorganization came as Live Search QnA was rebranded MSN QnA on February 18, 2009, then discontinued on May 21, 2009.
Microsoft recognized that there would be a problem with branding as long as the word "Live" remained in the name.
As an effort to create a new identity for Microsoft's search services,
Live Search was officially replaced by Bing on June 3, 2009.
The Bing name was chosen through focus groups, and Microsoft
decided that the name was memorable, short, and easy to spell, and that
it would function well as a URL around the world. The word would remind
people of the sound made during "the moment of discovery and decision
making". Microsoft was assisted by branding consultancy Interbrand in finding the new name. The name also has strong similarity to the word bingo, which means that something sought has been found, as called out when winning the game Bingo.
Microsoft advertising strategist David Webster proposed the name "Bang"
for the same reasons the name Bing was ultimately chosen (easy to
spell, one syllable, and easy to remember). He noted, "It's there, it's
an exclamation point [...] It's the opposite of a question mark." Bang
was ultimately not chosen because it could not be properly used as a
verb in the context of an internet search; Webster commented "Oh, 'I
banged it' is very different than [sic] 'I binged it'".
Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, also announced that Bing's official Chinese name is bì yìng (simplified Chinese: 必应; traditional Chinese: 必應), which literally means "very certain to respond" or "very certain to answer" in Chinese.
While being tested internally by Microsoft employees, Bing's codename was Kumo (くも), which came from the Japanese word for spider (蜘蛛; くも, kumo) as well as cloud (雲; くも, kumo), referring to the manner in which search engines "spider" Internet resources to add them to their database, as well as cloud computing.
Deal with Yahoo!
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that they had made a ten-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing, retaining the Yahoo! user interface.
Yahoo! got to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its
site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell
advertising on some Microsoft sites. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners made the transition by early 2012.
Legal challenges
On July 31, 2009, The Laptop Company, Inc. stated in a press release
that it would challenge Bing's trademark application, alleging that Bing
may cause confusion in the marketplace as Bing and their product
BongoBing both do online product search.
Software company TeraByte Unlimited, which has a product called BootIt
Next Generation (abbreviated to BING), also contended the trademark
application on similar grounds, as did a Missouri-based design company
called Bing! Information Design.
Microsoft contended that claims challenging its trademark were
without merit because these companies filed for U.S. federal trademark
applications only after Microsoft filed for the Bing trademark in March
2009.
Growth (2009–2023)
In October 2011, Microsoft stated that they were working on new
back-end search infrastructure with the goal of delivering faster and
slightly more relevant search results for users. Known as "Tiger", the
new index-serving technology had been incorporated into Bing globally
since August that year.
In May 2012, Microsoft announced another redesign of its search
engine that includes "Sidebar", a social feature that searches users'
social networks for information relevant to the search query.
On February 7, 2023, Microsoft began rolling out a major overhaul to
Bing, called the new Bing. The new Bing included a new chatbot feature,
at the time known as Bing Chat, based on OpenAI's GPT-4. According to Microsoft, one million people joined its waitlist within a span of 48 hours. Bing Chat was available only to users of Microsoft Edge
and Bing mobile app, and Microsoft said that waitlisted users would be
prioritized if they set Edge and Bing as their defaults, and installed
the Bing mobile app.
When Microsoft demoed Bing Chat to journalists, it produced several hallucinations, including when asked to summarize financial reports.
The new Bing was criticized in February 2023 for being more
argumentative than ChatGPT, sometimes to an unintentionally humorous
extent. The chat interface proved vulnerable to prompt injection attacks with the bot revealing its hidden initial prompts and rules, including its internal codename "Sydney". Upon scrutiny by journalists, Bing claimed it spied on Microsoft employees via laptop webcams and phones. It confessed to spying on, falling in love with, and then murdering one of its developers at Microsoft to The Verge reviews editor Nathan Edwards. The New York Times journalist Kevin Roose
reported on strange behavior of Bing Chat, writing that "In a two-hour
conversation with our columnist, Microsoft's new chatbot said it would
like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with
the person it was chatting with."
In a separate case, Bing researched publications of the person with
whom it was chatting, claimed they represented an existential danger to
it, and threatened to release damaging personal information in an effort
to silence them.
Microsoft released a blog post stating that the errant behavior was
caused by extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions which "can
confuse the model on what questions it is answering."
Microsoft later restricted the total number of chat turns to 5
per session and 50 per day per user (a turn is "a conversation exchange
which contains both a user question and a reply from Bing"), and reduced
the model's ability to express emotions. This aimed to prevent such
incidents.
Microsoft began to slowly ease the conversation limits, eventually
relaxing the restrictions to 30 turns per session and 300 sessions per
day.
In March 2023, Bing reached 100 million active users.
That same month, Bing incorporated an AI image generator powered by OpenAI's DALL-E 2, which can be accessed either through the chat function or a standalone image-generating website. In October, the image-generating tool was updated to the more recent DALL-E 3.
Although Bing blocks prompts including various keywords that could
generate inappropriate images, within days many users reported being
able to bypass those constraints, such as to generate images of popular
cartoon characters committing terrorist attacks. Microsoft would respond to these shortly after by imposing a new, tighter filter on the tool.
On May 4, 2023, Microsoft switched the chatbot from Limited
Preview to Open Preview and eliminated the waitlist, however, it
remained available only on Microsoft's Edge browser or Bing app until
July, when it became available for use on non-Edge browsers. Use is limited without a Microsoft account.
On November 15, 2023, Microsoft announced that Bing Chat was to be merged into Microsoft Copilot.
On 23 April 2024, Microsoft launched Phi-3-mini, a cost-effective AI model designed for simpler tasks.
Microsoft Copilot, formerly known as Bing Chat, is an chatbot
developed by Microsoft and released in 2023. Copilot utilizes the
Microsoft Prometheus model, built upon OpenAI's GPT-4 foundational large language model,
which in turn has been fine-tuned using both supervised and
reinforcement learning techniques. Copilot can serve as a chat tool,
write different types of content from poems to songs to stories to
reports, provide the user with information and insights on the website
page open in the browser, and use its Microsoft Designer feature to
design a logo, drawing, artwork, or other image based on text. Microsoft Designer supports over a hundred languages.
Copilot can also cite its sources, similarly to Google's Bard after its Gemini integration, xAI's Grok, and OpenAI's ChatGPT,
which Copilot's conversational interface style appears to mimic.
Copilot is capable of understanding and communicating in major languages
including English, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese,
but also dialects such as Bavarian. The chatbot is designed to function
primarily in Microsoft Edge, Skype, or the Bing app, through a dedicated webpage or internally using built-in app features.
Example of content generated by Copilot in Bing when prompted "Wikipedia"
Third-party integration
Facebook users have the option to share their searches with their Facebook friends using Facebook Connect.
On June 10, 2013, Apple announced that it would be dropping Google as its web search engine in favor of Bing. This feature is only integrated with iOS 7 and higher and for users with an iPhone 4S or higher as the feature is only integrated with Siri, Apple's personal assistant.
Integration with Windows 8.1
Windows 8.1 includes Bing "Smart Search" integration, which processes all queries submitted through the Windows Start Screen.
Translator
Bing Translator is a user facing translation portal provided by
Microsoft to translate texts or entire web pages into different
languages. All translation pairs are powered by the Microsoft Translator, a statistical machine translation platform and web service, developed by Microsoft Research, as its backend translation software. Two transliteration pairs (between Chinese (Simplified) and Chinese (Traditional)) are provided by Microsoft's Windows International team. As of September 2020, Bing Translator offers translations in 70 different language systems.
Knowledge and Action Graph
In 2015 Microsoft announced its knowledge and action API to correspond with Google's Knowledge graph with 1 billion instances and 20 billion related facts.
Bing Predicts
The idea for a prediction engine was suggested by Walter Sun,
Development Manager for the Core Ranking team at Bing, when he noticed
that school districts were more frequently searched before a major
weather event in the area was forecasted, because searchers wanted to
find out if a closing or delay was caused. He concluded that the time
and location of major weather events could accurately be predicted
without referring to a weather forecast
by observing major increases in search frequency of school districts in
the area. This inspired Bing to use its search data to infer outcomes
of certain events, such as winners of reality shows. Bing Predicts launched on April 21, 2014. The first reality shows to be featured on Bing Predicts were The Voice, American Idol, and Dancing with the Stars.
The prediction accuracy for Bing Predicts is 80% for American Idol, and 85% for The Voice.
Bing Predicts also predicts the outcomes of major political elections
in the United States. Bing Predicts had 97% accuracy for the 2014 United States Senate elections, 96% accuracy for the 2014 United States House of Representatives elections, and an 89% accuracy for the 2014 United States gubernatorial elections. Bing Predicts also made predictions for the results of the 2016 United States presidential primaries. It has also done predictions in sports, including a perfect 15 for 15 in the 2014 World Cup, and an article on how Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella did well in his March Madness bracket entry.[70]
In 2016, Bing Predicts failed to predict the correct winner of the 2016 US presidential election, suggesting that Hillary Clinton would win by 81%.
International
Bing is available in many languages and has been localized for many countries.
Even if the language of the search and of the results are the same,
Bing delivers substantially different results for different parts of the
world.
Webmaster services
Bing allows webmasters to manage the web crawling status of their own websites through Bing Webmaster Center. Users may also submit contents to Bing via the Bing Local Listing Center, which allows businesses to add business listings onto Bing Maps and Bing Local.
Mobile services
Bing Mobile
allows users to conduct search queries on their mobile devices, either
via the mobile browser or a downloadable mobile application.
Bing News
Bing News (previously Live Search News) is a news aggregator powered by artificial intelligence.
In August 2015 Microsoft announced that Bing News for mobile devices
added algorithmic-deduced "smart labels" that essentially act as topic
tags, allowing users to click through and explore possible relationships
between different news stories. The feature emerged as a result from
Microsoft research that found out about 60% of the people consume news
by only reading headlines, rather than read the articles. Other labels that have been deployed since then include publisher logos and fact-check tags.
Software
Toolbars
The Bing Bar, a browser extensiontoolbar
that replaced the MSN Toolbar, provides users with links to Bing and
MSN content from within their web browser without needing to navigate
away from a web page they are already on. The user can customize the
theme and color scheme of the Bing Bar and choose which MSN content
buttons to display. Bing Bar also has the local weather forecast and
stock market positions.
The Bing Bar integrates with the Bing search engine. It allows
searches on other Bing services such as Images, Video, News and Maps.
When users perform a search on a different search engine, the Bing Bar's
search box automatically populates itself, allowing the user to view
the results from Bing, should it be desired.
Microsoft released a beta version of Bing Desktop, a program
developed to allow users to search Bing from the desktop, on April 4,
2012. The production release followed on April 24, supporting Windows 7 only. Upon the release of version 1.1 in December 2012 it supported Windows XP and higher.
Bing Desktop allows users to initiate a web search from the
desktop, view news headlines, automatically set their background to the
Bing homepage image, or choose a background from the previous nine
background images.
The discontinued Live Search versions of the Windows Sidebar gadgets
Prior to October 30, 2007, the gadgets were known as Live Search gadget and Live Search Maps gadget; both gadgets were removed from Windows Live Gallery due to possible security concerns. The Live Search Maps gadget was made available for download again on January 24, 2008 with the security concern addressed. However, around the introduction of Bing in June 2009 both gadgets were removed again.
Marketing
Debut
Bing's debut featured an $80 to $100 million online, TV, print, and
radio advertising campaign in the US. The advertisements did not mention
other search engine competitors, such as Google and Yahoo!, directly by
name; rather, they tried to convince users to switch to Bing by
focusing on Bing's search features and functionality. The ads claimed that Bing does a better job countering "search overload".
Market share
Before the launch of Bing, the market share of Microsoft web search
pages (MSN and Live search) had been small. By January 2011, Experian Hitwise showed that Bing's market share had increased to 12.8% at the expense of Yahoo! and Google. In the same period, Comscore's
"2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review" report showed that "Bing was the big
gainer in year-over-year search activity, picking up 29% more searches
in 2010 than it did in 2009". The Wall Street Journal noted the jump in share "appeared to come at the expense of rival Google Inc". In February 2011, Bing beat Yahoo! for the first time with 4.37% search share while Yahoo! received 3.93%.
Counting core searches only, i.e., those where the user has an
intent to interact with the search result, Bing had a market share of
14.54% in the second quarter of 2011 in the United States.
The combined "Bing Powered" U.S. searches declined from 26.5% in 2011 to 25.9% in April 2012. By November 2015, its market share had declined further to 20.9%. As of October 2018, Bing was the third-largest search engine in the US, with a query volume of 4.58%, behind Google (77%) and Baidu (14.45%). Yahoo! Search, which Bing largely powers, has 2.63%.
UK advertising agencies in 2018 pointed to a study by a Microsoft
Regional Sales Director suggesting the demographic of Bing users is
older people (who are less likely to change the default browser of
Windows), and that this audience is wealthier and more likely to respond
to advertisements.
To counter EU accusations that it was trying to establish a
market monopoly, in September 2021 Google's lawyers claimed that one of
the most commonly searched words on Microsoft Bing was Google, which is a
strong indication that Google is superior to Bing.
Search partners
In July 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners made the transition by early 2012. The deal was altered in 2015, meaning Yahoo! was only required to use Bing for a "majority" of searches.
DuckDuckGo has used multiple sources for its search engine, including Bing, since 2010.
Ecosia uses Bing to provide its search results as of 2017.
Bing was added into the list of search engines available in Opera browser from v10.6, but Google remained the default search engine.
Mozilla Firefox made a deal with Microsoft to jointly release "Firefox with Bing", an edition of Firefox using Bing instead of Google as the default search engine. The standard edition of Firefox has Google as its default search engine, but has included Bing as an option since Firefox 4.0.
In 2009 Microsoft paid Verizon Wireless US$550 million to use Bing as the default search provider on Verizon's BlackBerry and have the others "turned off". Users could still access other search engines via the mobile browser.
Live Search
Since 2006, Microsoft had conducted tie-ins and promotions to promote Microsoft's search offerings. These included:
Amazon's A9 search service and the experimental Ms. Dewey
interactive search site syndicated all search results from Microsoft's
then search engine, Live Search. This tie-in started on May 1, 2006.
Search and Give – a promotional website launched on January 17, 2007
where all searches done from a special portal site would lead to a
donation to the UNHCR's organization for refugee children, ninemillion.org. Reuters AlertNet
reported in 2007 that the amount to be donated would be $0.01 per
search, with a minimum of $100,000 and a maximum of $250,000 (equivalent
to 25 million searches). According to the website, the service was decommissioned on June 1, 2009, having donated over $500,000 to charity and schools.
Club Bing
– a promotional website where users can win prizes by playing word
games that generate search queries on Microsoft's then search service
Live Search. This website began in April 2007 as Live Search Club.
Big Snap Search – a promotional website similar to Live Search Club.
This website began in February 2008, but was discontinued shortly
after.
Live Search SearchPerks! — a promotional website which allowed users
to redeem tickets for prizes while using Microsoft's search engine.
This website began on October 1, 2008 and was decommissioned on April
15, 2009.
"Decision engine"
Bing has been heavily advertised as a "decision engine", though thought by columnist David Berkowitz to be more closely related to a web portal.
Bing Rewards
Bing Rewards was a loyalty program launched by Microsoft in September 2010. It was similar to two earlier services, SearchPerks! and Bing Cashback, which were subsequently discontinued.
Bing Rewards provided credits to users through regular Bing searches and special promotions. These credits were then redeemed for various products including electronics, gift cards, sweepstakes, and charitable donations. Initially, participants were required to download and use the Bing Bar for Internet Explorer in order to earn credits; but later the service was made to work with all desktop browsers.
The Bing Rewards program was rebranded as "Microsoft Rewards" in 2016,
at which point it was modified to only two levels, Level 1 and Level 2.
Level 1 is similar to "Member", and Level 2 is similar to "Gold" of the
previous Bing Rewards.
The Colbert Report
During the episode of The Colbert Report that aired on June 8, 2010, Stephen Colbert stated that Microsoft would donate $2,500 to help clean up the Gulf oil spill each time he mentioned the word "Bing" on air. Colbert mostly mentioned Bing in out-of-context situations, such as Bing Crosby and Bing cherries.
By the end of the show, Colbert had said the word 40 times, for a total
donation of $100,000. Colbert poked fun at their rivalry with Google,
stating "Bing is a great website for doing Internet searches. I know
that, because I Googled it."
Bing It On
In 2012, a Bing marketing campaign asked the public which search
engine they believed was better when its results were presented
unbranded, similar to the Pepsi Challenge in the 1970s. This poll was nicknamed "Bing It On". Microsoft's study of almost 1,000 people showed that 57% of participants preferred Bing's results, with only 30% preferring Google.
Potential sale
CNBC
reported in February 2024 that a legal filing from Google in its
antitrust case said Microsoft offered to sell the search engine to Apple
in 2018. This came after earlier reporting in September 2023 from Bloomberg that Microsoft discussed selling it to Apple in 2020.
The CNBC article also stated Apple said no to repeated attempts to make Bing the default search engine on its devices.
Adult content
Bing censors results for "adult" search terms for some regions,
including India, People's Republic of China, Germany and Arab countrieswhere required by local laws.
However, Bing allows users to change their country or region preference
to somewhere without restrictions, such as the United States, United
Kingdom or Republic of Ireland.
Notice
reading "Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch
setting, which filters out results that might return adult content. If
you're seeing adult content, tell us about it so we can filter it in the
future. To learn more about SafeSearch requirements in your country or
region, see How Bing delivers search results."
Microsoft has been criticized for censoring Bing search results to queries made in simplified Chinese characters which are used in mainland China. This is done to comply with the censorship requirements of the government in China.
Microsoft has not indicated a willingness to stop censoring search
results in simplified Chinese characters in the wake of Google's
decision to do so. All simplified Chinese searches in Bing are censored regardless of the user's country. The English-language search results of Bing in China has been skewed to show more content from state-run media like Xinhua News Agency and China Daily. On 23 January 2019, Bing was blocked in China. According to a source quoted by The Financial Times, the order was from the Chinese government to block Bing for "illegal content". On 24 January, Bing was accessible again in China.
Around 4 June 2021, the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, Bing blocked image and video search results for the English term "Tank Man"
in the US, UK, France, Germany, Singapore, Switzerland, and other
countries. Microsoft responded that "This is due to an accidental human
error".According to an investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek, the full explanation was that Microsoft accidentally applied its Chinese blacklist globally.
In December 2021, it was required by a "relevant government agency" to suspend its auto-suggest function in China for 30 days. The search engine became partially unavailable in mainland China from 16 December until its resumption on 18 December 2021.
According to the company, a government agency in March 2022 required
that it suspend auto-suggest function in China for seven days; Bing did
not specify the reason. In May 2022, a report released by the Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto found that Bing's autosuggestion system censored the names of Chinese Communist Party
leaders, dissidents, and other persons considered politically sensitive
in China in both Chinese and English, not only in China but also in the
United States and Canada.
In April 2023, Citizen Lab reported that Bing was more censorious in China than native Chinese search engines.
Copyright-infringing content
On February 20, 2017, Bing agreed to a voluntary United Kingdom code
of practice obligating it to demote links to copyright-infringing
content in its search results.
Performance issues
Bing was criticized in 2010 for being slower to index websites than
Google. It was also criticized for not indexing some websites at all.
Alleged copying of Google results
Bing has been criticized by competitor Google for utilizing user input via Internet Explorer, the Bing Toolbar, or Suggested Sites,
to add results to Bing. After discovering in October 2010 that Bing
appeared to be imitating Google's auto-correct results for a
misspelling, despite not actually fixing the spelling of the term,
Google set up a honeypot, configuring the Google search engine to return specific unrelated results for 100 nonsensical queries such as hiybbprqag.
Over the next couple of weeks, Google engineers entered the search term
into Google, while using Microsoft Internet Explorer, with the Bing
Toolbar installed and the optional Suggested Sites enabled. In 9 out of
the 100 queries, Bing later started returning the same results as
Google, despite the only apparent connection between the result and
search term being that Google's results connected the two.
Microsoft's response to this issue, coming from a company
spokesperson, was: "We do not copy Google's results." Bing's Vice
President, Harry Shum, later reiterated that the search result data
Google claimed that Bing copied had in fact come from Bing's very own
users. Shum wrote that "we use over 1,000 different signals and features
in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we
get from some of our customers, who opt into sharing anonymous data as
they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all
users."
Microsoft stated that Bing was not intended to be a duplicate of any existing search engines.
Child pornography
A study released in 2019 of Bing Image search showed that it both freely offered up images that had been tagged as illegal child pornography
in national databases, as well as automatically suggesting via its
auto-completion feature queries related to child pornography. This easy
accessibility was considered particularly surprising since Microsoft
pioneered PhotoDNA, the main technology used for tracking images reported as originating from child pornography. Additionally, some arrested child pornographers reported using Bing as their main search engine for new content. Microsoft vowed to fix the problem and assign additional staff to combat the issue after the report was released.
Privacy
In 2022, France imposed a €60 million fine on Microsoft for privacy
law violations using Bing cookies that prevented users from rejecting
those cookies.
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