Microsoft has been a major player in the AI race and one of the first companies to introduce a chatbot that is worthy of ChatGPT competitor — Co-pilotNow, the company is turning its attention back to the project that started it all: the Bing search engine.
On Wednesday, Microsoft introduced a new generative search experience that combines conversational responses facilitated by Generative AI with a search engine results page found on traditional search engines.
Also: OpenAI releases SearchGPT: Here’s what it can do and how to access it
For example, in the demo below, a user asks, “What is Spaghetti Western?” Bing provides a conversational response with site links, and on the right, users can see traditional search results and scroll through them as they normally would.
I’m excited to share a sneak peek of Bing’s new generative search experience. It combines the power of LLMs and SLMs with Bing search results to generate a more enjoyable and efficient user experience design. This is another significant step in our evolution of AI-powered search.
— Jordi Ribas (@JordiRib1) July 24, 2024
If you’re a Bing user and this sounds familiar, it’s because Bing has been serving up AI-powered answers in its search engine results since February of last year. The most important change in this update is that the user experience design has been modified to better fit the needs of users.
Also: OpenAI’s new GPT-4o mini dominates the chatbot field. Here’s why.
This UX design addresses a popular complaint about Google’s AI overviews at the top of search results, which cause users to scroll longer to reach the results page they expected.
Designing Bing’s generative search experience
Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
Microsoft also shared that it has refined its models to make them more accurate in the Bing experience and is gathering feedback to improve that experience. To allay concerns about AI search engines’ conversational responses hurting publishers by preventing people from clicking on their content, Microsoft noted that early data shows the new experience keeps the same number of clicks to websites.
Microsoft beat OpenAI to the punch with OpenAI Introducing SearchGPT Just a day later, SearchGPT is similar to Bing’s new generative search in that it has the same user experience, combining a traditional search engine results page with conversational responses from generative AI. However, OpenAI’s experience is only available through a waitlist, while Bing’s is slowly rolling out.