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.

  • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I don’t use bing, I use duckduckgo. If they start prioritizing AI results, I’ll change search engines again.

    • ISOmorph@feddit.org
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      3 months ago

      So do I, so it’s worth taking note since ddg ist just a bing frontend

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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        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.

    • Imhotep@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I like how Kagi does it.
      You can choose to have AI answer only when ending the search terms with a question mark

    • ALQ@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I’ve only ever known people to use Bing for porn (or because their workplace forces it on them). There are people who actually choose it?

    • cheers_queers@lemm.ee
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      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.

      • lud@lemm.ee
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        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.

      • hperrin@lemmy.world
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        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.

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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        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

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I hope this doesn’t affect DDG, but they’ve also added AI garbage to the page recently, so 🙁

  • NineMileTower@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pub
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    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

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Crawling the web is expensive, and plenty of bigger sites have proprietary deals (Reddit serving exclusive results to Google for instance). Also, since actively hosting data costs money, lots of sites have archived or compressed their offerings. Others have set up higher and higher paywalls, to limit what anyone without a subscription can see.

          The end result is a treasure trove of data that is inaccessible to modern crawlers and scrapers. If you’re not tapping into one of the big search engine catalogs, you’re going to miss a lot of the more attractive results.

          Then there’s the problem of AI crap filling up lots of the spaces that used to be mineable for search results. This isn’t a problem unique to Bing. AI contamination is everywhere and crawlers can’t avoid it easily. What’s a modern search engine to do?

      • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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        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.

      • tb_@lemmy.world
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        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.

    • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca
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      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.

  • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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    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…