Bing.com is still around?! But it's 2026? No one could have predicted this. At a minimum, we all assumed Microsoft would have rebranded it to 'Internet Search with Microsoft CoPilot' by now. Ask Jeeves just shut down, but it made sense why that lasted so long. It was clearly some kind of money laundering scheme. And a good one at that.
The discovery was made by a postgraduate developer working on their doctoral thesis who wanted to use the domain for the research project of their new protocol 'Bing' which is an evolution of Ping. The developer was saddened Microsoft is being so stingy with the domain saying, "Typical big-tech. Throwing their money around to keep domain names for a site no one is using, just to keep the trademarked assets."
When we asked the developer what they will do now that they can't purchase that domain, they refused to answer the question and instead talked about Bing the protocol. Like a real PhD student.
After learning the search engine is still being maintained by Microsoft, we at globalGlob(**/*) wanted to try it. But...just didn't. We already pay for Kagi and don't feel like trying anything new right now.