Bing’s importance in the information landscape of the U.S. shouldn’t be overlooked. While its share of the search market in the U.S. might be dwarfed by that of Google, it has steadily increased over the past ten years. Bing’s partnerships with Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo, and Apple mean that even users who don’t use Bing as their default search engine or go directly to its home page might get information from Bing. What’s more, Bing’s position as the default search engine for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Edge, which account for roughly 17.7% of the browser market in the U.S., gives it a special foothold among Windows users. Microsoft itself boasts that Bing enjoys a 33% market share in the U.S. and serves five billion searches per month:
It is something of a problem, then, that Bing appears to be returning an alarming amount of disinformation and misinformation in response to user queries — far more than Google does, for instance. Bing’s somewhat irregular results and hands-off approach to topics like suicide have attracted users’ attention before, even earning the distinction of becoming a meme. And while researchers have written about Bing’s troubled record on abusive content, specifically with regard to how it has handled autocomplete suggestions, there have been no broader studies of the prevalence of disinformation and misinformation in Bing’s top search results. (Google, for what it’s worth, has also struggled to rein in autocomplete’s tendency to turn up objectionable speech).
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