Microsoft’s innovative search engine blends the new and the old
Microsoft is a big player in the AI race and was one of the first to launch a worthy chatbot. ChatGPT competitor — copilot. Now, the company is focusing back on the project that started it all: the Bing search engine.
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced a new generative search experience that incorporates conversational responses facilitated by AI generated with the search results page found in traditional search engines.
Also: OpenAI Launches SearchGPT — Here’s What It Can Do and How to Access It
For example, in the demo below, a user asks “What is a Spaghetti Western?” Bing provides a conversational response with links to websites, and on the right, the user can see traditional search results, scrolling through them as usual.
I’m excited to share an early look at Bing’s new generative search experience. It combines the power of LLM and SLM with Bing search results to create a more engaging and efficient UX layout. This is another significant step forward in our evolution of AI-powered search.
— Jordi Ribas (@JordiRib1) July 24, 2024
If you’re a Bing user and this sounds similar, it’s because Bing has been providing AI-powered answers in its search engine results since February last year. The biggest change from this update is the revamped UX layout to better suit the needs of users.
Also: OpenAI’s New Mini GPT-4o Is Dominating the Chatbot Arena. Here’s Why.
This UX layout addresses a common complaint about Google’s AI overview at the top of Search results, forcing users to scroll longer to get to the results page they expect.
Bing’s Generative Search Experience Layout
Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
Microsoft also shared that it has refined its models to make them more accurate in the Bing experience and is collecting feedback to improve that experience. To quell concerns that the AI search engine’s conversational responses are hurting publishers by discouraging people from clicking on their content, Microsoft noted that early data shows that the new experience keeps the same number of clicks to sites.
Microsoft Beats OpenAI with OpenAI SearchGPT launch just a day later. SearchGPT is similar to Bing’s new generative search in that it has the same UX, combining a traditional search engine results page with generative AI conversational answers. However, OpenAI’s experience is only available via a waitlist, while Bing is rolling it out slowly.
