Microsoft this afternoon previewed its answer to Google’s AI-powered search experiences: Bing generative search.
Available for only a “small percentage” of users at the moment, Bing generative search, underpinned by a combo of large and small generative AI models (mum’s the word on which models exactly), aggregates info from around the web and generates a summary in response to search queries.
For example, if a user searches “What is a spaghetti western?” Bing generative search will show information about the film subgenre’s history and origin and top examples, along with links and sources that show where those details came from. As with Google’s similar AI Overviews feature, there’s an option to dismiss AI-generated summaries for traditional search from the same results page.
“This is another important step in evolving the search experience on Bing and we’re eager to get feedback throughout this journey,” Microsoft writes in a post on its official blog. “We are slowly rolling this out and will take our time, garner feedback, test and learn and work to create a great experience before making this more broadly available … We look forward to sharing more updates in the coming months.”
Microsoft insists that Bing generative search, which evolves the AI-generated chat answers it launched on Bing in February 2023, “fulfill[s] the intent of the user’s query more effectively.” But much has been written about AI-generated search results gone wrong.
Google’s AI Overviews infamously suggested putting glue on a pizza. Arc Search told one reporter that cut-off toes will eventually grow back. Genspark recommends a few weapons that might be used to kill someone. And Perplexity ripped off news articles written by other outlets, including CNBC, Bloomberg, and Forbes, without giving credit or attribution.
AI-generated overviews threaten to cannibalize traffic to the sites from which they source their info. Indeed, they already are, with one study finding that AI Overviews could negatively affect about 25% of publisher traffic due to the de-emphasis on article links.
For its part, Microsoft insists that it’s “maintaining the number of clicks to websites” and “look[ing] closely at how generative search impacts traffic to publishers.” The company volunteers no stats to back this up, however, alluding only to “early data” that it’s choosing to keep private for the time being.
That doesn’t instill a ton of confidence.
