Microsoft has just announced a huge update to Bing that overhauls the search engine to put AI-powered answers first.
This means that when a search query is entered, the results page will pop up with a primary AI-generated answer detailing all the curated sources that have been tapped to get that result. You’ll still get the traditional search results on the Bing search page, but they will be presented to the side of the AI-generated material (in a smaller right-hand panel).
This change is currently rolling out to a small number of Bing users, but it’ll presumably become more widely available before too long. From what we can tell there’s no obvious way to turn off the AI results if you wanted to do so.
Bing?
It’s an acronym, it means “But It’s Not Good”
I don’t use Bing anyway. 🤷
They too? But that with Google was a mistake on CEO level, didn’t Bing hear that?
Wait, it didn’t do that already?
To those who are curious enough, try setting up a web scraper. Search for innocuous, perhaps popular but simple words, in a Bing image search. Now look at all the URLs and start grouping by domains.
From my experience in the field, Bing has a problem with malicious websites w/ images that pop up in these results and serve fake AV alert phishing sites.
Stay curious y’all, data analytics can be fun and enlightening
Will this help users on Bing with their number 1 desired search destination, Google?
Or their 7th most common destination, Bing?
Google has been enshitifying for a while now and I stopped using it because Bing gave me more relevant results. Apparently MS is trying to reverse that though.
Wow. They all make looking for proper information on things really hard these days.
Also not at all the point at all , but the new font is hard on the eyes
Unsurprising from the company that still hasn’t fixed the light gray on light gray scroll bar.
That’s nice. I didn’t want to use Bing anyways.
Ddg shows bing results. Are we sure they won’t regurgitate hallucinations too?
So do most “alternative” search engines, often with some of their own spice on top.
I know Startpage happens to use Google in their back-end, but Google’s policy is a lot more restrictive than Microsoft’s given their market position.
Kagi & DDG already have their own ai stuff
i don’t really have the technical knowledge to answer that, But I don’t think that’s how the Bing API works.
As does Ecosia.
Crawling the web is expensive, and plenty of bigger sites have proprietary deals (Reddit serving exclusive results to Google for instance). Also, since actively hosting data costs money, lots of sites have archived or compressed their offerings. Others have set up higher and higher paywalls, to limit what anyone without a subscription can see.
The end result is a treasure trove of data that is inaccessible to modern crawlers and scrapers. If you’re not tapping into one of the big search engine catalogs, you’re going to miss a lot of the more attractive results.
Then there’s the problem of AI crap filling up lots of the spaces that used to be mineable for search results. This isn’t a problem unique to Bing. AI contamination is everywhere and crawlers can’t avoid it easily. What’s a modern search engine to do?
More free disinformation, good job microsoft…
Fuck I wish I could turn them off…first thing I do is scroll past the AI garbage
Real talk, is the AI going to write faster? 95% of the time, I’ll see my answer in the more traditional results before Bing AI has even typed out a single sentence. If they’re going to switch to AI appearing before you can see the traditional results, that’ll make it a lot slower to use…
