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 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!
Well, damn. Now I have to continue to not use Bing. Next thing you know I’ll have to continue to not use Google.
Wow. They all make looking for proper information on things really hard these days.
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?
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.
i don’t really have the technical knowledge to answer that, But I don’t think that’s how the Bing API works.
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.
More free disinformation, good job microsoft…
Everyone’s hating but honestly fair enough move.
On the whole, nobody uses Bing or takes it seriously anyways and so I guess they have to find their niche. It’s certainly not aimed at us (Lemmy/Fediverse users) who are generally more privacy conscious. If it can attract some mainstream users (e.g., Google users, people like your parents, etc) or stop some users from immediately switching their search engine to Google, then it might be a good decision for them.
Bing providing the exact same service as Google but worse clearly wasn’t working for them.
I use Bing. Partly because it’s the only real option if you want to search from the windows start menu. But also because I do like how it presents info a bit better, and also like its knowledge graph a little better than the one Google has.
That being said, the engine does have a lot of issues with relevancy. And its image search is almost unusable. So I often find myself needing to go to. Other than that, I’m fine with changing it to my default across everything I own. I just wish MS would fix its most blatant issues instead of bullying old people into using it.
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…
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.
They too? But that with Google was a mistake on CEO level, didn’t Bing hear that?
I don’t use Bing anyway. 🤷
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.
