4 min Applications

Bing Generative Search is Microsoft’s variant of Google’s AI search engine

Can Microsoft solve the problems of Google AI Overviews?

Bing Generative Search is Microsoft’s variant of Google’s AI search engine

Microsoft is introducing Bing Generative Search, which is the company’s answer to Google’s AI search engine. The latter has largely rolled back search results by AI due to inaccuracies. Is Microsoft tackling it better?

Bing Generative Search combines the Bing search engine with large and small language models. Based on the LMs, the function can understand the search query, but the search result is a summary of information available on the web.

For the user, this should save time. Instead of the need to read several search results and websites, the answer comes in a result that “generates and matches content dynamically, in a new AI-generated layout to more effectively meet the intent of the user’s search query.” With this description, Microsoft introduces the new feature.

Source: Microsoft

Will the glue on pizza story repeat itself?

Google was ahead of its rival search engine, Bing, in introducing AI search. However, the feature quickly proved to have problems, in which sarcastic Reddit posts were used to generate a meaningful answer. That resulted in advice to spread glue on pizza to get cheese to stick to the dough properly. In addition, the tool hallucinated here and there, resulting in search results that stated that Obama is a Muslim.

In response to the blunders, Google decided to largely roll back the availability of AI Overviews, as the AI search results are officially called. The rollback hasn’t been changed yet according to U.S. media -the AI features have not been made available in Europe-.

Read also: Google limits AI search results to combat advice of glue on pizza

With the decision to partially roll back the rollout of AI Overviews, Google shared what was causing the problem. It was said to be due to the limited number of search results that exist for certain (niche) search queries. The AI tool searches among these search results for an answer for the user, not in a set of training data like ChatGPT, for example. How and if the AI search tool in Bing can overcome these problems will become clear soon.

More cautious rollout

Bing’s AI search engine is currently only becoming available in a limited preview. “We are rolling this out slowly and will take our time, gather feedback, test and learn, and work on creating a great experience before making this more widely available.” This approach is very different from Google, which was often criticized for the rapid rollout of its AI search engine, which came across as unprofessional.

That it has kept up with criticism of AI Overviews is also evident with its statement that the company does not want to harm smaller websites with the rollout of Bing Generative Search. That fear is enormously prevalent because an AI search result prevents users from actually visiting a website to get an answer. Microsoft listens but does not necessarily address these criticisms. It is already claimed that the introduction of the AI search engine does not affect the number of visitors to websites, but no figures have been shown to support this quote. Google did something similar just before AI came to the search engine, stating that its own tests showed that links to websites in the AI summaries get more clicks than links in an old-fashioned search result.

The lack of numerical evidence in both statements does not reassure users. Nor does Microsoft’s only slightly different approach in how AI search results are generated reassure. The rollout may be more gradual, but without solutions to the problems that arose before, it is only a matter of time before Bing Generative Search generates the same nonsense and potentially dangerous answers.