Microsoft this afternoon previewed Bing Generated Search, its answer to Google's AI-powered search experience.
Currently available only to a “small percentage” of users, Bing Generated Search is based on a combination of large- and small-scale generative AI models (it's not clear exactly which models) that aggregate information from across the web and generate summaries in response to search queries.
For example, if a user searches for “What is a Spaghetti Western?”, a Bing-generated search will surface information about the history, origins, and top examples of the film subgenre, along with links and sources to show where those details came from. As with Google's similar AI summary feature, there is an option to close the AI-generated summary for a traditional search from the same results page.
“This is another important step in evolving the Bing search experience, and we look forward to receiving your feedback throughout this journey,” Microsoft said in an official blog post. “We're rolling this feature out gradually so we can take the time to gather feedback, test, learn, and work to create a great experience before making it more widely available. We look forward to sharing more updates with you in the coming months.”
Image credit: Bing
Microsoft announced that Bing-generated search, an evolution of the AI-generated chat responses launched in February, is now available on Bing.[s] “It understands the intent of users’ queries more effectively.” However, there have been many articles written about AI-generated search results being wrong.
Google's AI Overviews famously suggested putting glue on pizza, Arc Search told a reporter that severed toes would eventually regrow, Genspark recommended several weapons that could be used to kill someone, and Perplexity plagiarized articles written by outlets like CNBC, Bloomberg, and Forbes without crediting or citing the sources.
Image credit: Bing
AI-generated summaries threaten to cannibalize traffic to source sites. In fact, they already are: one study found that AI summaries could negatively impact roughly 25% of publishers' traffic because they de-emphasize article links.
Meanwhile, Microsoft “maintains clicks to its website” and “[ing] “We are taking a closer look at how generative search impacts traffic to publishers,” however, the company didn’t provide any statistics to back this up, referring only to “early data” which it chose to keep private for the time being.
That doesn't inspire much confidence.