Microsoft has reached $1M giveaway levels of desperation to attract users to Bing

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.

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. ®