Down for several hours on Thursday, May 23, the Bing search engine brought with it several competing services, such as Qwant, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. A good reminder of their true nature: none of these services have their own engine.
Qwant, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo… These search engines have one thing in common: they are not really search engines. All present themselves as alternatives to Google and its 90% market share, but none of them is truly independent. Qwant, even if it offers several interesting services, is not the French alternative that it claims to be.
Indeed, with a few exceptions, alternative search engines have not developed their own technology for searching the web. They often rely on Bing which offers access to its algorithms in the form of an API.
Without Bing, Qwant breaks down
On Thursday May 23, Bing experienced a global outage. For several hours, it was impossible to carry out a search on the Microsoft site, which never found the slightest result.
Immediate consequence: all sites that use the Bing API, such as Qwant and DuckDuckGo, also went down. The Bing API is a technology that allows a developer to integrate Microsoft technology into their own site.
To provide results, Microsoft constantly scans and analyzes site content. This technology is expensive, requires the use of high-performance servers and can go wrong if it is poorly optimized. Qwant claims to have been developing its own engine for years but, like the others, still uses Bing.
Faced with Google’s domination, Microsoft is banking on the openness of Bing to drive its search engine. The Brave engine, which developed its own technology, made fun of Bing’s breakdown to highlight the false “independence” of its rivals.
ChatGPT also concerned… until the arrival of OpenAI?
In addition to search engines, some generative artificial intelligence services partially went down on May 23. Microsoft Copilot obviously, but also ChatGPT, which uses Bing to search the web. The service itself is independent.
In the near future, OpenAI, the new web giant, could break free from Bing. Rumor has it that the creator of ChatGPT is developing his own search engine, with technology different from the others. In the meantime, Google can sleep soundly.
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