Above: Illustration by Ruslan Batiuk/DepositPhotos

BitDepth#1396 for March 06, 2023

Most people who use an online search engine don’t use it particularly well. Despite the growing capabilities of modern search engines to parse clumsily worded terms and even to offer corrections for egregious misspellings, very few internet users use simple techniques to enhance their searches.

Do you enclose a specific word or phrase in quotation marks to limit searches to that specific term?

Simply starting a word with a capital letter focuses searches on proper nouns instead of the more general use of the word.

Do you Boolean? Simply using terms such as and, not and or in constructing search queries can make a huge difference in the relevance of results.

The shortcomings of most searches offers a market for assistive artificial intelligence (AI) to improve search results while adding concierge services to search engines.

Microsoft took a surprising lead in this potential market by partnering with Open.AI, the creators of ChatGPT. The new AI powered Bing app had 750,000 downloads after the announcement, compared with 800,000 for all 2022.

As a search engine, Bing hasn’t had the impact that the company expected after its introduction in 2009.

While Google stuck to a simple and direct search page, Microsoft experimented with curiosities like siloed search products, Club Bing, Bing Cashback and Bing Predicts, which offered statistically calculated opinions on races.

Bing Predicts notoriously pegged Hilary Clinton as the winner of the 2016 US General Election.

The company also dithered in shuttering its Live Search product before replacing it with Bing.

The search service also seemed to be tied more intimately into the Windows platform and even today; the Bing you get when using Microsoft’s Edge browser isn’t quite the same as the one you get in other browsers.

But Microsoft also seems to have learned from splitting its search into almost a half-dozen options and even the link to Bing Predicts now goes a ChatGPT entry field.

The web tool hasn’t done badly. It is the third most widely used search engine in the world, and runs second to Google outside China, where Google doesn’t operate and Baidu reigns supreme.

Here’s a nifty little not-so-secret that you probably didn’t know. The Yahoo search engine has also been Bing for the last five years, despite still retaining the Yahoo branding. Search results on Ecosia are also provided by Bing.

But it’s safe to say that Microsoft didn’t get into search to be the “other” engine, but until ChatGPT, it seemed to be constantly playing catchup with Google, despite multiple back-end upgrades over the last 13 years.

For once in the search engine wars, Microsoft appears to have caught Google flat-footed. Microsoft has an early version of the service live on its Bing apps and search pages while Google is still testing its search AI, Bard with a small group.

Microsoft didn’t get into search to be the “other” engine, but until ChatGPT, it seemed to be constantly playing catchup with Google.

Will this win Bing some percentage points in the search engine wars?
It’s early days yet.

For one thing, the version of ChatGPT that’s being offered online by Open.AI is subtly different from the one that’s implemented on Bing.
Over the past few weeks, Open.AI has clearly been working hard to make ChatGPT less assertive in its responses, and its responses have become cautiously inoffensive and accommodating.

Which is nice, except that while offering information decisively can be a potentially offensive and intimidating process, the verbal gymnastics that have been programmed into ChatGPT seem fawning and weak.

An overly apologetic response to a question answered by a chatbot makes it seem indecisive.

The version of the AI on Bing is not only more definite in its responses, it also has settings that tailor how it responds.

Those settings are “More Creative,” “More Balanced” and “More Precise.”
On Bing’s search page, there’s a new option for search, simply titled “Chat.” In chat mode, the window slides down to reveal the new AI interface.

Choosing between options also changes the colour of the interface, from a calm powder blue to a soft lilac.

While the answers offered by each option are essentially similar. A query about how to remove hot glue from a laminate desk (don’t ask) ranged from a long, bulleted list with detailed guidelines to a two sentence instruction.

There’s now a new version of the Bing search app with AI that both understands speech and can respond by reading text results. The app also opens links directly in its own browser in an effort to compete against Google.

In mobile internet search, Google has a virtual monopoly at 93.5 per cent of searches.

It’s continuous use (and error correction) that makes the biggest difference in the utility of a chatbot, and if Bing can refine ChatGPT to the point where it makes for more useful searches, Microsoft might have a chance to offer a real alternative to Google search.

At least until Bard comes along.