this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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262
Bing has been revamped to prioritize AI search results – whether you like it or not (www.techradar.com)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
47 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

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."

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

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...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

More free disinformation, good job microsoft...

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I hope this doesn’t affect DDG, but they’ve also added AI garbage to the page recently, so 🙁

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

But I like burning conversations with one of the four LLMs!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Kagi

DDG

Ecosia

Qwant

Startpage

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Ddg shows bing results. Are we sure they won't regurgitate hallucinations too?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

i don't really have the technical knowledge to answer that, But I don't think that's how the Bing API works.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Kagi & DDG already have their own ai stuff

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

As does Ecosia.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Also not at all the point at all , but the new font is hard on the eyes

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Unsurprising from the company that still hasn't fixed the light gray on light gray scroll bar.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

That's nice. I didn't want to use Bing anyways.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago

Wow. They all make looking for proper information on things really hard these days.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Will this help users on Bing with their number 1 desired search destination, Google?

Or their 7th most common destination, Bing?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/1/22703263/google-lawyer-argues-bing-used-find-google-top-search-defaults

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Bing?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

It's an acronym, it means "But It's Not Good"

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago

Well, damn. Now I have to continue to not use Bing. Next thing you know I'll have to continue to not use Google.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Bing images is simply terrible

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Wait, it didn't do that already?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I don't use bing, I use duckduckgo. If they start prioritizing AI results, I'll change search engines again.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Bing got really good really recently, and since DDG is to a large extent a frontend for Bing presumably it recently got really good

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

My workplace also forces me to do all my porn searches on Bing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well, microsoft chooses bing for you sometimes

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

As an ex-bing user they also basically pay you in the form of rewards

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I've gambled it all away and got... nothing.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I like how Kagi does it.
You can choose to have AI answer only when ending the search terms with a question mark

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

So do I, so it's worth taking note since ddg ist just a bing frontend

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

The aurhor forget that they are many other search engines

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Name two that aren't Bing or Google and that don't suck ass.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

I don't use Bing anyway. 🤷