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.
I don’t use bing, I use duckduckgo. If they start prioritizing AI results, I’ll change search engines again.
So do I, so it’s worth taking note since ddg ist just a bing frontend
If the description provided by the article is accurate, and it remains so in the near future, that won’t be an issue for DDG users. All that DDG would need to do is to pull the results out of the side panel, instead of the central space.
I like how Kagi does it.
You can choose to have AI answer only when ending the search terms with a question markI’ve only ever known people to use Bing for porn (or because their workplace forces it on them). There are people who actually choose it?
Well, microsoft chooses bing for you sometimes
As an ex-bing user they also basically pay you in the form of rewards
I’ve gambled it all away and got… nothing.
My workplace also forces me to do all my porn searches on Bing.
genuinely asking… how do you ever find relevant results on duckduckgo? I’ve tried switching to it many times over the years but i just get too frustrated by its lack of intuitiveness.
I don’t know, it just works for me.
I use duckduckgo exclusively. It happens that I occasionally switch to Google (which is btw very easy with “!g”) but that pretty much never solves my problem.
I’ve only had a handful of searches that didn’t find what I was looking for, and about half of those weren’t any better on Google.
Bing got really good really recently, and since DDG is to a large extent a frontend for Bing presumably it recently got really good
I hope this doesn’t affect DDG, but they’ve also added AI garbage to the page recently, so 🙁
But I like burning conversations with one of the four LLMs!
Wow. They all make looking for proper information on things really hard these days.
Well, damn. Now I have to continue to not use Bing. Next thing you know I’ll have to continue to not use Google.
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
Bing images is simply terrible
Ddg shows bing results. Are we sure they won’t regurgitate hallucinations too?
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?
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.
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.
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.
The aurhor forget that they are many other search engines
Haven’t used it for such things lately but Bing used to be the search engine for porn. Like all engines I think they start out great but then start to tweak the results to basically only serve what they want you to see. Helping you find what you want to see becomes a distant in second.
Name two that aren’t Bing or Google and that don’t suck ass.
More free disinformation, good job microsoft…
That’s nice. I didn’t want to use Bing anyways.
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…
They too? But that with Google was a mistake on CEO level, didn’t Bing hear that?
It’s like Google and starts off by showing you the most relevant answer you wanted through an info card. But then it goes on longer and longer under things that are less and less relevant.
Like, one of their examples is “What is a spaghetti western?”, And it starts with the answer you were probably looking for
A subgenre of western films produced by Italian filmmakers
But then it just starts going on and on with increasingly less relevant things like “History and origins”, “Best and most influential movies”, and then “Music and Soundtracks” before then getting the actual search results.
It’s literally designed to keep you from leaving the site. And all the sources seem to require quite a few clicks on mobile.
Bing?
It’s an acronym, it means “But It’s Not Good”
