Bing has been revamped to prioritize AI search results – whether you like it or not
Microsoft has just announced a major update to Bing, giving the search engine a major overhaul and putting AI-based answers first.
This means that when a search query is entered, the results page will appear with a primary AI-generated answer that includes all of the curated sources that were tapped to get that result. You’ll still get the traditional search results on the Bing search page, but they’ll be presented to the side of the AI-generated material (in a smaller panel on the right).
The Official Microsoft blog post (indicated by Windows Central) explains this major overhaul like this: “This new experience combines the foundation of Bing search results with the power of large and small language models (LLMs and SLMs). It understands the search query, evaluates millions of information sources, dynamically matches content, and generates search results in a new AI-generated layout to more effectively fulfill the intent of the user’s search query.”
This change is currently rolling out to a small number of Bing users, but it will likely be available more broadly soon. As far as we can tell, there’s no obvious way to turn off the AI results if you want to.
Embrace the Future or Endure the Present?
This big change isn’t really good news if you’re not interested in AI-powered search, because you’re essentially losing two-thirds of your results page to AI, leaving relatively little room for traditional searches.
Microsoft states in its blog post that it will continue to evaluate the impact of AI search on both websites and readers, which is positive news because things may not be “stuck” in this way if there is room for improvement. We can only wait until the new Bing Generative Search is more widespread to really see what people think of Microsoft’s new search strategy.
Personally, I don’t want AI-generated answers on my search page at all, but I realize that there are probably many people, such as students and researchers, who would like quick answers to their questions with the sources already listed.
That said, we’ve seen time and time again that AI isn’t as reliable and accurate as we think it should be – it can be wrong, or in some cases, pick up incorrect information very easily. Remember when Google Gemini was picking strange answers out of Reddit posts and telling people to put rocks on pizza?
I can only hope that traditional (non-AI) search isn’t abandoned altogether, and hopefully Microsoft offers some workable level of control over whether users want AI search results in Bing, rather than having to ignore half the results presented.