Microsoft has reached $1M giveaway levels of desperation to attract users to Bing
Microsoft offers $1M prize to folks willing to use Bing • The Register
Microsoft has reached $1M giveaway levels of desperation to attract users to Bing
Stuffing it full of AI hasn't helped, so let's try financial incentives
We're not saying Microsoft is desperate for people to use Bing, but a $1 million sweepstakes that grants entries to users of the search engine sure quacks like a duck.
The contest, which kicked off last month, is open to anyone with a Microsoft account (who resides in the US, Canada, UK, France, or Germany) and a willingness to rely on Bing's oh-so-accurate search results. As is often the case with sweepstakes like this, entrants can gain multiple chances to win if they keep performing various tasks, many of which have to do with using Bing, to earn virtual tickets.
The sweepstakes page, ostensibly a Microsoft Rewards contest and not a Bing-centered one, indicates that each eligible person can earn up to 200 entries for doing things like changing their default search engine to Bing and using it to do a search, installing Microsoft Edge or the Bing app for iOS and Android, using Bing Travel or just using Bing to get a weather report, translate text, or find a recipe.
Additional entries are awarded for roping in additional participants, buying stuff on the Microsoft Store, and earning a "Bing daily streak" by using the engine to search three times a day for seven days in a row.
Whatever you do online, just please do it with Bing, Microsoft seems to be pleading – and with good reason.
Don't believe me? Bing it
Launched in 2009, Bing has barely moved the needle on Google's search dominance in its 15 years of existence. Microsoft has tried – hard – to bring Bing into the spotlight, even relying on forced product placement on shows like the relaunched Hawaii 5-0 that only ended in the search engine being lampooned for its efforts.
- Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4
- It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox
- Bing and Copilot fall from the clouds around the world
- Microsoft PC Manager app bizarrely suggests Bing as a Windows fix-all
More recently, Microsoft has tried to boost Bing's profile by adding its ChatGPT-based Copilot AI bot to the service in 2023, a project that resulted in minuscule gains for Bing's share of the search engine market, based on the latest figures from StatCounter.
The addition of further generative search features this past summer also haven't amounted to much, with Bing's market share briefly surpassing 4 percent last month before dropping back down into the mid-3-percent range at the beginning of this month.
In other words, nothing else has worked so far, so why not try giving away a million bucks to anyone willing to make the change – at least temporarily until they reach their maximum 200 entries in the contest, with the entry period closing at the end of December.
As we noted above, the contest kicked off last month and could very well be the reason for the slight bump in Bing's share of the search engine market in October that seems to have already abated. Whether it'll give Bing a further boost between now and the end of the year remains unclear. ®
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Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
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The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.