No Room for Microsoft Search in Bing in a World Increasingly Dominated by Copilot

In a change that might be linked to the ever-increasing influence of Copilot across Microsoft 365, Microsoft announced (MC961557, 19 December 2024) their intention to remove Microsoft Search in Bing on March 31, 2025. Microsoft says that the decision is the result of their work to “streamline search experiences and focus on enhancing core productivity tools.” A more truthful assessment might advance the case that Microsoft 365 Copilot (BizChat) is now the preferred way for customers to integrate work and web search results, even if that means that a free facility is being replaced by one costing $360/user annually.

Microsoft introduced Microsoft Search by Bing in May 2019. The idea is simple: connect the search indexes generated by Microsoft Search from Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams content and make the data available through searches run from bing.com. Figure 1 shows the “work” results generated by searching bing.com for “Search in Bing.” Depending on what Bing finds, other results might be available under messages (Teams and Outlook), sites, and people.

The integration works well for people whose preferred search engine is bing.com. Once you sign into your tenant account, Bing automatically looks for matches in work sources. The problem is that bing.com is not heavily used, with industry assessments putting its use at around 10% of the desktop search engine market.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Uses Bing

Removing Microsoft Search in Bing doesn’t mean the disappearance of Bing-based searches from Microsoft 365. BizChat and Microsoft Copilot both use Bing to search web sources. Bing is not my favorite search engine and some of the web-based results I see in Copilot leave me wondering where they came from. However, it cannot be denied that Copilot does a much better job of stitching work and web results together to answer user questions.

Tags Being Retired Too

Microsoft Search in Bing lasted nearly five years. The tags feature, introduced in December 2023 to allow users to categorize content “in a way that makes sense to you,” is getting an accelerated retirement and will disappear from the Microsoft 365 app starting on January 6, 2025, and will be completely gone by January 10 (MC961601). The speed of withdrawal indicates that not many people use tags. This isn’t at all surprising given the very low level of utility delivered by the feature.

You can define and apply tags to files through the Microsoft 365 app (Figure 2) but then what? There’s nothing else you can do except apply a tag to add a small splash of color to the details shown for files. It seems like this was a feature introduced without much thought and no follow-up.

The Microsoft 365 app is due to be overhauled in mid-January 2025 (MC958905, 16 December 2024) and the demise of tags is probably an outcome of the review to decide what to keep and what to drop from the app.

Don’t Worry About Retirements

There’s been a spate of retirements within Microsoft 365 recently. Office Delve retired earlier this month and Microsoft announced that Viva Goals will retire in December 2025. Tenant administrators can be forgiven for thinking that the functionality offered by Microsoft 365 is a tad unstable.

The fact is that change happens all the time in the cloud. Office 365 and Microsoft 365 have seen retirements in the past. No product has a guaranteed right to succeed. Some will launch and discover soon afterward that the expected market is just not there. Others will have a burst of initial success and decline thereafter. If a Microsoft 365 product isn’t successful, it won’t last long. Another recent factor seems to be that the availability of engineering resources has tightened because more people are working on Copilot-related features. The pressure is on to reduce effort on non-core or underused features, which is what might have eventually killed Microsoft Search in Bing.

Kaizala, StaffHub, Cortana Scheduler are three examples of products that appeared and disappeared without trace. Viva Topics was retired earlier this year, and Sway is on life support. Yammer was the great hope of 2014 that had to reinvent itself as Viva Connections to stay relevant after Teams came along and became the focus of chat-based collaboration within the suite.

On that thought, this blog will take a short break until the New Year. Over that period, the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team will still be busy preparing the January 2025 update, including figuring out how to cover the change discussed here. I hope that you all get some well-deserved rest over the holidays and come back refreshed for new (or renewed) challenges in the big, bad world of Microsoft 365 in 2025.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.