Microsoft's generative search engine weds something new, something old

Microsoft has been a major player in the AI race and one of the first companies to unveil a chatbot that’s a worthy ChatGPT competitor — Copilot. Now, the company is returning its attention to the project that started it all: the Bing search engine. 

On Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled a new generative search experience that combines the conversational responses facilitated by generative AI with a search engine results page found in traditional search engines.

Also: OpenAI launches SearchGPT – here’s what it can do and how to access it

For example, in the demo below, a user asks, “What is Spaghetti Western?” Bing provides a conversational response with links to sites, and on the right, users can view the traditional search results, scrolling through them as they typically would. 

If you’re a Bing user and this sounds similar, it’s because Bing has been delivering AI-powered answers in its search engine results since February last year. The biggest change from this update is that the UX layout was modified to suit users’ needs better.  

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This UX layout addresses a popular complaint about Google’s AI overviews at the top of Search results, which cause users to scroll for longer to get to the results page they were expecting. 

Microsoft also shared that it has refined its models to make them more accurate in the Bing experience and is collecting feedback on improving that experience. To quell concerns about AI search engine conversational responses harming publishers by preventing people from clicking on their content, Microsoft noted that early data shows the new experience maintains the same number of clicks to websites. 

Microsoft beat OpenAI to the punch, with OpenAI unveiling SearchGPT just a day later. SearchGPT is similar to the new Bing generative search because it has the same UX, combining a traditional search engine results page with generative AI conversational answers. However, OpenAI’s experience is only available via a waitlist, whereas Bing’s is rolling out slowly.