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

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨lemmee_in@lemm.ee⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/bing-has-been-revamped-to-prioritize-ai-search-results-whether-you-like-it-or-not

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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Comments

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NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t use bing, I use duckduckgo. If they start prioritizing AI results, I’ll change search engines again.

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- ISOmorph@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  So do I, so it’s worth taking note since ddg ist just a bing frontend
  
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  - lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨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.
    
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- Imhotep@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I like how Kagi does it.
  You can have it appear only when ending the search terms with a question mark
  
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- alquicksilver@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ve only ever know people to use Bing for porn (or because their workplace forces it on them). There are people who actually choose it?
  
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  - bl_r@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well, microsoft chooses bing for you sometimes
    
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  - HeavyRaptor@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    My workplace also forces me to do all my porn searches on Bing.
    
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- cheers_queers@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - lud@lemm.ee ⁨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.
    
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  - hperrin@lemmy.world ⁨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.
    
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  - Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨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
    
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hperrin@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I hope this doesn’t affect DDG, but they’ve also added AI garbage to the page recently, so 🙁

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- dubyakay@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  But I like burning conversations with one of the four LLMs!
  
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hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wow. They all make looking for proper information on things really hard these days.

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NineMileTower@lemmy.world ⁨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.

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stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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

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- soulfirethewolf@lemdro.id ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Bing images is simply terrible
  
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gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Kagi

DDG

Ecosia

Qwant

Startpage

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- downhomechunk@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ddg shows bing results. Are we sure they won’t regurgitate hallucinations too?
  
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  - RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    As does Ecosia.
    
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  - fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Kagi & DDG already have their own ai stuff
    
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  - tb_@lemmy.world ⁨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.
    
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  - gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨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.
    
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- Blisterexe@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  brave search
  
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shotgun_crab@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
More free disinformation, good job microsoft…

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Nollij@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Will this help users on Bing with their number 1 desired search destination, Google?

Or their 7th most common destination, Bing?

Source: theverge.com/…/google-lawyer-argues-bing-used-fin…

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- OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca ⁨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.
  
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vegaquake@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
That’s nice. I didn’t want to use Bing anyways.

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RickyWars@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Everyone’s hating but honestly fair enough move.

Nobody uses Bing anyways and so I guess they have to find their niche. It’s certainly not aimed at Fediverse users who are more privacy conscious, but if it can attract some mainstream users (e.g., Google users) 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.

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- soulfirethewolf@lemdro.id ⁨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.
  
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small44@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The aurhor forget that they are many other search engines

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- BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world ⁨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.
  
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- Wistful@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Name two that aren’t Bing or Google and that don’t suck ass.
  
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Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨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…

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teamevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Fuck I wish I could turn them off…first thing I do is scroll past the AI garbage

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radivojevic@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Bing?

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- laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s an acronym, it means “But It’s Not Good”
  
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MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They too? But that with Google was a mistake on CEO level, didn’t Bing hear that?

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db2@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t use Bing anyway. 🤷

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soulfirethewolf@lemdro.id ⁨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.

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gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Also not at all the point at all , but the new font is hard on the eyes

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- helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Unsurprising from the company that still hasn’t fixed the light gray on light gray scroll bar.
  
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Red_October@lemmy.world ⁨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.”

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