Bing is Microsoft's search engine. It has been around since 2009 and sits at about 3.9% global market share, making it the second largest after Google. Over 450 million searches go through it every day, covering web pages, images, videos, maps, and news. In 2023, Microsoft wired OpenAI's GPT-4 into Bing through Copilot, so you now get AI-generated answers mixed in with traditional search results.

It is free and deeply tied to the Microsoft ecosystem. Windows, Edge, and Microsoft 365 all default to Bing for search. There is also a rewards program that pays you in points for using Bing, redeemable for gift cards. On desktop, Bing holds 12.2% market share, but on mobile it barely registers at under 1%.

Privacy is where things get complicated for EU users. Microsoft collects your search queries, IP address, location, and device identifiers to build advertising profiles. That data feeds a search ad business worth roughly $19.5 billion a year. In 2022, France's data protection authority fined Microsoft EUR 60 million specifically because Bing's cookie consent made it harder to reject tracking than to accept it.

Worth knowing

Microsoft treats enterprise and consumer Bing users very differently. If you sign in with a Microsoft Entra ID (business account), your searches are not used for ads, not shared with third parties, and not fed into AI training. Regular consumer users get none of that. Your searches go straight into the ad targeting pipeline.

One more thing that matters if you care about EU data protection: web searches routed through Copilot to Bing are not covered by Microsoft's Data Protection Addendum or the EU Data Boundary. Microsoft confirmed this in August 2025. So if you use Copilot to search the web, that data sits outside EU data protection commitments entirely. Your search history also stays on Microsoft's servers forever unless you go into the privacy dashboard and delete it yourself.