How well do you know Microsoft Bing?
This isn't the daily quiz from the Bing homepage — it's a quiz about Bing itself. Six questions on the search engine's name, history, famous photos and AI features.
Did you know?
- In China, Bing uses the name 必应, pronounced 'bì yìng', which can be read as 'certain to respond'. Companies often choose Chinese brand names that sound similar to the original while carrying a positive meaning, and Bing's local name was designed to suggest a search engine that always has an answer.
- Bing's search rewards programme, which began as Bing Rewards, was renamed Microsoft Rewards in 2016. Users earn points for activities such as searching and completing daily tasks, and can exchange them for gift cards or donate them to charities.
- IndexNow is used by many website owners to get new pages discovered faster. When a site publishes or updates a page, it sends a short message containing the page address, and participating search engines can then visit and index it within a short time instead of waiting to find it on their own.
The story of Microsoft Bing
Microsoft Bing is the web search engine built by Microsoft and used on its own, inside Windows and Microsoft Edge, and as a source of results for other services. It grew out of more than a decade of Microsoft search projects and has changed its focus several times, from shopping and travel decisions to maps, images and, most recently, artificial intelligence. For many people, though, Bing is best known for something simple: the striking photograph that greets visitors on its homepage every day.
From MSN Search to Bing
Microsoft entered web search in 1998 with MSN Search, which at first relied on results from other companies. It launched its own search technology in 2005, renamed the service Windows Live Search in 2006 and then simply Live Search in 2007. Live Search struggled to stand out, so Microsoft rebuilt and rebranded it. Bing, developed under the codename Kumo, was unveiled in May 2009 by chief executive Steve Ballmer and opened to the public a few days later.
The famous homepage photos
Bing's homepage has featured a different large photograph each day since the service began. The images show landscapes, wildlife, cities and festivals from around the world, often chosen to match seasons, holidays or anniversaries, and each one credits its photographer. Many people use them as desktop backgrounds, and Microsoft offers an official app that changes a computer's wallpaper to the daily image automatically. The homepage has also offered extras linked to the picture, such as facts, links to learn more and short quizzes.
Search, maps and AI
Bing includes much more than web search. Bing Maps offers aerial views taken at an angle, called bird's-eye imagery, and street-level photos. Bing Image Creator, launched in 2023, lets users generate pictures from text descriptions. The same year, Bing added an AI chat assistant that could answer questions in full sentences and cite web sources, a feature that later became Microsoft Copilot. For website owners, Bing Webmaster Tools shows how Bing sees and ranks their pages.