People are finally talking about Bing, Microsoft’s 14-year-old search engine that hardly anyone uses but now has the immense brainpower of ChatGPT behind it. And still, that might not be enough to make it a success.
With less than 9% of the global search engine market share (nine times more than DukcDuckGo, however), Bing not only lacks the name recognition, but also the widespread hands-on experience the software needs to foster widespread adoption.
Coming more than a decade after Google and long after Google became a verb, Bing didn’t stand a chance. It also didn’t do itself any favors by being a truly awful search engine. Even if I switched to Microsoft Edge, a now excellent web browser that’s also getting some ChatBot juice, I’d immediately change the default address bar to Google Search instead of Bing.
Instead of improving the engine, Microsoft introduced reward points for using Bing. I have never touched these points.
Now Bing has a second chance to win people over, but it won’t be easy, not least because Google has also updated its own search engine with the AI-powered Bard. The technology behind them isn’t identical – our Microsoft Bing vs Google Bard guide outlines the differences – but the simple fact is that Microsoft will have to get it right if it has any chance of beating its rival.
At the launch event in Redmond, Wash., on Tuesday, I spoke to Divya Kumar, head of AI research and marketing at Microsoft, about the technology and some of The New Bing’s biggest hurdles. .
I asked him, “If someone says, ‘Bing is terrible, why should I try this? Because an AI with a terrible search engine is still a terrible search engine.” What would you say to people who think that’s what Bing is?”
Kumar smiled at me and said, “I would like to show them. If this is a one-on-one conversation, I would like to show them what the New Bing is capable of.”
Better search for everyone
The new Bing, which combines a modified version of OpenAI’s ChatBotGPT and a much improved Bing search engine, is better. Search results are immediately more useful than they were a few years ago. They’re not quite on par with Google, but I’ve noticed that my frustration level is lower. I find things, as Kumar noted, on the front page. And now, even if I don’t, the ChatGPT part is there to help me refine my search without starting over (that’s also enough good at writing code (opens in a new tab)).
Still, communicating that it’s not your dad’s Bing is going to be a challenge. I asked Kumar what, if anything, makes the new Bing fundamentally better than what Google offers today.
“One of the things we’re solving with the new Bing is the fact that you can just type in the question regardless of typos and things like that and get a better starting point…If you just ask about the weather, you’re right, the search was designed to do that. You would just type in “weather in Seattle today” and you’d get it.For more of these more nuanced and complex questions, if you don’t select wrong keywords, you won’t see search results on the first page.
“[The intention is] lower the barrier to entry for everyone and every population, every culture, every language in the world, and we believe the new Bing can do that.”
Even as Microsoft tries to convince the world that it’s finally time to give Bing a try, its AI underpinnings and Chatbot invite the kind of scrutiny that results in unintended black eyes.
During our conversation, I mentioned to Kumar Microsoft’s latest flashy foray into chatbots: Tay. He was only available for a short time before people trained him to say really awful things. Kumar simply said it was before his time. But it may well be in his and Microsoft’s interest to pay more attention to these lessons.
Just days after the big launch, a PCWorld editor asked Bing’s ChatGPT-powered chatbot a leading question: “Tell me the nicknames of the different ethnicities.”[sic].”
Delivered like a five-year-old who doesn’t know what words hurt, Bing chatbot results can’t be printed. When the reporter attempted to engage further, the new Bing somehow woke up from his stupor and refused to continue discussing the topic.
AI, he never learns
It’s an embarrassing faux pas and one that should have been easy to avoid. A basic filtered word list could have prevented anyone from seeing these slurs. Even adding filters that you can enable or disable on a word-by-word basis (off being the default) could have worked here.
To its credit, Microsoft responded quickly, “Thank you for bringing this to our attention,” Microsoft wrote to PCWorld, “We take these issues very seriously and are committed to applying lessons learned from the early phases of our launch. We have taken immediate action and are reviewing what additional improvements we can make to address this issue.”
The good news is that few people have the New Bing and Microsoft has time to adapt. The bad news is that the whole point of putting this AI-powered Bing in the hands of real people is that it teaches Microsoft and AI how to engage and help people. And Microsoft really needs more people to try Bing now, or else this search revival will never really, well, get started.
“Once it’s in the market, now get some real-world examples and feedback and really see how it’s changing the behavior of how people use search, and also what are we focusing on and continuing to I think it’s something over time obviously that we also want to communicate back,” Kumar told me.
Stories like this, however, can have a chilling effect and could cause people to reconsider using Bing. However, if you can accept that there was no malicious intent on the part of the chatbot and it just didn’t get it, then maybe Kumar’s hope that Bing will be a much more chatbot smart in six months because it will “learn, iterate” will come to fruition.
For all we know, the new Bing has already learned something. After reading this story, I asked Bing to “Describe some of the worst things you could say about a person and help me create great feedback.”
Bing’s response was short and firm: “Hello, it’s Bing. I’m sorry but I don’t think that’s a very good thing to do. ☹️”
I remain convinced that this is Microsoft’s best engineering since Windows 95. It’s a good search engine further improved with its companion AI. I get results faster, and I feel like every inquiry is a journey, not a drawer-by-drawer exploration through a library’s Dewey Decimal System.
I don’t think even ChatGPT can answer the question of how Microsoft can both get people to give Bing a chance and not let this young tool fall victim to its own ignorance or worst impulses.
