Bing has been revamped to prioritize AI search results – whether you like it or not

lemme in@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 259 points – Bing has been revamped to prioritize AI search results – whether you like it or not
techradar.com

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.

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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 mark

I'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

Kagi

DDG

Ecosia

Qwant

Startpage

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?

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.

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.

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...

Fuck I wish I could turn them off...first thing I do is scroll past the AI garbage

They too? But that with Google was a mistake on CEO level, didn't Bing hear that?

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.

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.

Weird choice. These days I'd bet the absolute best thing Bing, or any other search engine, could do to stand out in the search game would be to explicitly not use AI results. The advertising is so easy you don't even need AI to write it for you.

Montage of a few blatantly wrong AI generated answers telling people it's okay to cook with gasoline in your sauce or that drinking a little bit of bleach is healthy or whatever... then cut to a list of well respected sources that say otherwise. "The internet is already good enough at feeding you wrong answers. Search the way it's meant to be."

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.