Microsoft is all set to more than triple the pricing for its Bing Search APIs across all markets in what can be seen as an effort to recoup its investments into the search engine.
The new pricing will kick in from May 1, 2023, for all Microsoft Bing APIs including Image Search, Video Search, News Search, Visual Search, Entity Search, Web Search, Autosuggest, and Spell Check, the company said in a blog post.
“The new pricing model reflects more accurately the technology investments Bing continues to make to improve Search, including newer experiences such as Bing Visual Search and Bing Entity Search,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
Last month, Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment in OpenAI after reports claimed that the company was planning to integrate ChatGPT with its search engine.
Microsoft has been betting on the rising popularity of ChatGPT, as it showcases a new way to search the internet and respond to queries using conversational language — different from what Google offers currently in the way of links.
Google commands more than 91% market share in the internet search category globally, compared to Bing’s abysmal 2.95% as of November 2022, according to similarweb.com.
The hike in prices can also be attributed to the addition of OpenAPI’s ChatGPT engine to Bing.
“Customers will also benefit from new AI integrations that improve the Bing search index experience,” the spokesperson added.
Steep rise in Web Search and Image Search APIs prices
A comparison of the prices reflects a 3x to 10x increase across different tiers for Bing Search and Bing Image Search APIs.
In the S1 category that allows 250 transactions per second, the new pricing for Web Search stands at $25 per 1,000 transactions compared to just $7 per 1,000 transactions.
In the same category, Bing Image Search’s new pricing stands at $25 per 25,000 transactions compared to just $7 for the same number of transactions.
In the S2 category,…
2023-02-22 07:00:04
Source from www.computerworld.com
Microsoft recently announced major pricing changes for the Bing Search API for certain customers, including the elimination of the existing free tier and incremental increases for commercial customers. The changes indicate that Microsoft is looking to recover investments made in the product.
The Microsoft Bing Search API (formerly known as the Bing Autosuggest API) is a cloud-based search interface that lets customers retrieve information from the web such as top news, images, and videos. The API also includes features such as auto-completion queries and spell-checker data.
Microsoft has been investing heavily into their search technology and it appears they are looking to recoup these investments by transitioning free customers to the lowest Basic tier, beginning at $3 per 1000 queries, which is a significant increase over the previous free tier. Other tiers offer more features and queries, but at a higher cost.
The company cited customer feedback for the changes, claiming that the new pricing model more accurately reflects the value of the product and can better support the expense of running the service. In addition to the pricing changes, Microsoft has recently released a new Cognitive Services Search API, which builds on the Bing Search API with additional capabilities for natural language processing and image recognition.
The new pricing model reveals that Microsoft is prioritizing the development and maintenance of the Bing Search API, and their goal of recovering investments made into the product. Whether the new pricing structure is too costly for some customers remains to be seen.
