Despite Rumors Bing is now here to stay

Despite a number of rumors stating that Microsoft was planning to sell off Bing have persisted for sometime now, recent developments at the Build Developer’s conference point clearly to the opposite.

That said, there was a time when Microsoft had planned to sell off Bing, which, to them, was just a ‘search engine’ but all that’s changed today, with it offering much more than basic search as well as being a core platform for Microsoft.

One clue as to how important Bing is to Microsoft is Cortana, which is Microsoft’s new personal digital assistant.

Quite interestingly, Cortana pulls a lot of information from a number of services that are a part of the Bing ecosystem such as the search engine, machine learning tools, its voice-recognition service as well as the stream processing engine.

While it still remains to be seen if Cortana can match up to the likes of Sirius or Google Now but what is for sure is that none of this would have been made possible in the absence of Bing itself.

However, Bing is not only useful for Cortana but also built into a number of small features for Windows, especially the built-in search tools. Examples include Bing Code Search or even Maps.

Of course, it’s hard to speculate as to whether this was the plan all along for Bing yet this has resulted in the company being more agile so as to meet market demands.

And even though it has a long way to go to beat its competition such as Apple and Google, it still poses a challenge for the rest of the field to continue improving their services as a result.