We finally got access to the new Bing, Microsoft’s upgraded search engine that utilizes OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The new Bing is not just a search engine, but a conversational agent that can interact with you in natural language and provide you with personalized and intelligent search results. We’re going to unpack some of the things we noticed while using it over the weekend and why we think it is a game changer for web searching.
A Search Engine at It’s Core
First, the new Bing identifies as “Bing Search”, not an assistant. The new Bing does not pretend to be a human or a friend, rather it is a compiler of web content. Think web snippets but more complex answers. Because of this lack of conversational nature, it tries to reference factual statements by linking to its source web search results. Below Is an example of how to how it approaches search:
So right now I’m in the process of writing a book and I’m doing a little bit of research on the budgets when it comes to technology for the course of the last 100-125 years in America. What I was able to do was do a search of “what Americans spend their money on for entertainment in 1905”. what you will see is that I made a misspelling when I was searching, and the new Bing auto corrected that search and cross and cross referenced my initial search with another search of “average income in 1905”. From there it was able to create a concise summary. It was several bits of information along with citation links that I could click on to dive deeper into that information. instead of diving deeper, I did a follow up question of “how did a radio cost back then?” Bing once again did two separate searches also while also retaining the search for average income to create a follow up summary. It also provides something for writers that it’s difficult to quantify, which is the “light bulb moment”. These two search queries completely changed my focus and intent on the book that I’m writing. would I have gotten to that conclusion? most certainly but it would have taken me weeks or possibly months to come around to that epiphany.
While it’s not perfect now, it at least gives a starting point to research and can help frame further research. in my testing, I found lots of factual errors, but it was more of misplacing data and putting them alongside other data points and conflating them into being equal. Things like the average cost tended to be off.
Is This the Future?
After just a few searches, it was easy to see how this will be a sustainable business model for Microsoft moving forward. Along with citations and links, it was able to provide relevant search ads after queries. The way that the ads were served up were merely suggestions and weren’t trying to force me towards clicking on those ads. The new Bing retains the passive yet extremely relevant advertising nature that traditional search engines have had for the last two decades. This is vastly different than what we are seeing in things like voice assistants like Google Assistant or Alexa or in VR spaces where advertising seems to be forced into the mix and seems rather creepy. all of this reminds me of the promise of driverless cars and a lot of the advanced cruise control features we’re starting to see. that’s why I have coined self-searching and search engine in this title because that’s the best way to think about it, it will assist in searching for you to help you get to the answer to your original question instead of trying to “think”, or make up something along the way. This is one of the clear differences between Microsoft’s implementation and what we have been seeing on ChatGPT. In ChatGPT, it is allowing the user to validate an improper or incorrect statement that was fed to it initially and builds a response with the assumption that the was correct in their initial statement.
We’re excited to see how this technology continues to progress and we’re excited at the possibilities that will be available to our clients to get better exposure while customers are in the research process. if you have questions or want to learn more about how this could affect your business and its online marketing moving forward? Please reach out to us!
