This afternoon, Microsoft unveiled a preview of its answer to Google's AI-powered search features: Bing generative search.
Currently only available to a “small percentage” of users. Generative search with Bingwhich is predicated on a mix of enormous and small generative AI models (which models exactly will not be yet known), collects information from across the web and generates a summary in response to look queries.
For example, if a user searches for “What is a spaghetti western?”, Bing's generative search will display information concerning the history and origins of the film subgenre, in addition to the most effective examples, together with links and sources showing where those details got here from. As with Google's similar AI Summaries feature, there’s an choice to dismiss AI-generated summaries for traditional search on the identical results page.
“This is one other necessary step in evolving search on Bing, and we sit up for hearing your feedback along the best way,” Microsoft wrote in a post on its official blog. “We're rolling this out slowly and can take our time, gather feedback, test and learn, and work to create an incredible experience before we roll it out to a wider audience… We sit up for sharing more updates in the approaching months.”
Microsoft insists that Bing's generative search, which evolves the AI-generated chat responses that launched on Bing in February 2023, “more effectively meets the intent of the user query.” However, much has been written about failed AI-generated search results.
Google's AI Overviews infamously suggested putting glue on a pizza. Arc Search told a reporter that cut toes will grow back eventually. Genspark recommends some weapons that would kill someone. And Perplexity rip off news articles by other media outlets, including CNBC, Bloomberg and Forbes, without citing sources.
AI-generated overviews threaten to cannibalize traffic on the web sites they source their information from. In fact, that is already happening. One study found that AI overviews negatively impact about 25% of publisher traffic because of the lower emphasis on article links.
Microsoft, for its part, emphasizes that it’s “maintaining the variety of clicks on web sites” and “closely monitoring how generative search affects traffic to publishers.” However, the corporate doesn’t provide any statistics to support this statement, but only refers to “initial data” that it wants to maintain secret for now.
That doesn't exactly encourage much confidence.
