As a tech blogger I’m always interesting in trying new gadgets and seeing what the fuss is about. I’ve already been using Chat GPT, so the concept of having that alongside a traditional Bing search could pique anybody’s curiosity.
I wasn’t thrilled that Bing required me to use Edge to make the AI Chat work — seemed like an arbitrary/forced requirement. Don’t get me started on what I feel like it says about Edge that Microsoft feels the need to leverage the cool factor of their AI to strong arm people into using their browser.
But, I wanted to try the AI, so I downloaded Edge for my iPad Pro.
The best usage for it as a start, I figured, was to have it help me with writing projects for some clients the way I have used ChatGPT on its own in the past.
In one case, I asked it to help me come up with blog post ideas for a commercial renovation company.
It spit out a bunch of pretty standard fare stuff, so I refined the search to give me ideas beyond the run of the mill topics everyone in the industry always talks about. I pushed it to be a bit more creative.
Its output was exactly the same.
I tried several more variations of the command, thinking perhaps different phrasing would help it understand what I was after. It didn’t.
Some people have have found Bing’s Chat AI feature very helpful. One stand out example of that I’ve seen is asking it to help plan a party, where it gives suggestions on things to buy, where to find them, and types of activities to include.
For sure, any time you are relying on it simply to understand what you’re really after, perhaps better than a stock search engine does, and pull a bunch of existing info from around the web it seems to do a good job of that.
But my experience thus far has been that when you want it to use search data to make decisions, or to offer insight into a topic based on a body of content that’s out there without simply regurgitating that content, it falters.
It struck me that it seemed to be basing too much of its answer on search results it was finding, and not what the AI itself might have been able to reason was the best answer on its own. In this particular case, search results for renovation topics just generates trite stuff that ranks, and the AI was acting as a curator of those search results rather than devoting enough of its own reasoning to the answer.
I’ve given ChatGPT these types of prompts before and it produces better answers. But Chat GPT used in isolation, while it does have training material from search engines that it can pull from, does not seem to lean on search engines as directly for these kinds of questions, and I think that’s to its benefit.
I recognize that a lot of people have gotten some cool answers with other queries, and this is not to dismiss the AI altogether and argue that it has no usefulness.
But…
I think this is a mistake for Bing. As a search engine, Bing has struggled to do much better than capture 10% of the market share for a long time. To really differentiate itself from Google, it needs to present something more than a watered down search engine with a gimmick attached to it. That’s just not strong enough.
(That’s how I suspect people will see it in its current form after the initial luster wears off.)
Where I hope this partnership develops instead is for Bing to see itself as a platform for a useful AI that is enhanced by a search engine. The opposite priority of what it seems to be doing now.
I feel like if it nailed that, there would be a real reason to use Bing over Google, and that Bing could meaningfully offer something you just don’t get on Google.
Let’s see where it goes.