AI has been popping up in search results with questionable results for a while now — Google's badly-received AI summary feature recommended drinking urine — but it's not the only search engine experimenting with extensive use of AI on its search pages.
Microsoft introduced LLM-powered chat answers on Bing early last year, and has now begun experimenting with a “new generative search experience” for a small number of user queries (via The Verge ): For example, some users who search for the query “what is a spaghetti western” will not only see an AI box front and center, but they'll also see a page below it with source information for the AI results, pushing the traditional list of search results to the side.
I'm in the UK, so I had to use a US-based VPN to view this page; at the time of writing, the page appears to be region-dependent. After all, this is a test page, but it's a bit unsettling to see traditional search results relegated to a smattering of information on the side of the page to make room for a rather large AI boxout.
In the new design, more of the page is devoted to citing sources, with clickable boxes proving that the information came from trusted sites and that the entries below link directly to those sites.
And yet the main list of results, which is what you're likely actually looking for, is relegated to a side frame, and beneath each listing there are only two or three lines of text providing a brief description of the data referenced from the search.
In addition to being overwhelmingly AI-heavy, the page itself is visually cluttered, and feels more like a distraction than a focus on what you were actually looking for in the first place – the relatively simple answer to what a Spaghetti Western is, and some examples of the genre's highlights.
According to Microsoft, the new page combines the foundation of Bing's traditional search results with “the power of large- and small-scale language models.” While the attempt to clarify the veracity of the information presented here is laudable, there's still a lot of information that gets in the way of traditional, and perhaps more useful, results.
That said, Google's shaky AI Overviews rollout doesn't seem to have done any lasting damage to the company's reputation aside from some initial backlash, and Microsoft is likely eager to catch up, even if the features it integrates into Google Search aren't always particularly well-received.
MS said it is “continuing to closely monitor how generative search impacts traffic to publishers,” which could suggest that Google may be giving more consideration to sites that focus on creating things like human-created content than it's showing.
If you happen to come across an AI-focused Bing page, Microsoft encourages users to let them know what you think by clicking the “Like” and “Don't Like” buttons at the top of the page.
For now, these are just test pages, but they're an unsettling insight into what search will look like across the web in the future.
