Bing is a good search engine. I’m talking in terms of functionality and performance, and I’m not saying it’s perfect, of course, but overall Microsoft has done a good job, but it doesn’t quite jeopardize Google’s supremacy in that market. They have tried everything from integrating it into some Windows features to offering rewards for continued use. Everything is for trying to get a portion, even if it is not especially large, of a cake that currently only has one owner.
In this sense, it is more than imaginable that the thinking heads of Redmond should spend a lot of time thinking about what steps to take to achieve that goal, once it has been verified that replicating the same functions, or even trying to improve them, is not enough. The vast majority of users have already internalized that when they want to find something on the Internet they must turn to Google, so in order to grow Bing’s market share it is necessary to adopt more creative and interesting measures.
On the other hand, if there is an online service that has grown exponentially in popularity in recent weeks, it is undoubtedly ChatGPT. So much so that, even despite its shortcomings, I personally believe that it is the most outstanding application of 2022 and, although it seems too early to make statements of this caliber, I am increasingly reading comments stating that this AI can reach become the great alternative to online search engines, that is, to Google, Bing, etc.
When I was little, I didn’t fully understand the meaning of a very common phrase, “If you can’t beat your enemy, join him”, but I think that is perfectly explained by knowing, as we can read in The Information, that Microsoft and OpenAI are working together to integrate ChatGPT into Bing, according to sources cited by said media. It is not yet clear how such integration would take place, and there are certainly pros and cons to be weighed, but the idea itself is quite promising.
One of the problems with ChatGPT is that its data set it is not updated and the bot does not have access to the Internet when collecting information. This explains us that, for example, even today if we ask about Windows 11, it tells us that such an operating system does not exist and that the most recent version so far is Windows 10.
If ChatGPT could feed on the results offered by Bing searches and, furthermore, provide complex answers to user queries precisely based on them, we could indeed be talking about the future of search engines. This poses serious challenges, of course, such as constant monitoring of sources to avoid bias, which is unfortunately so common in many AIs. If Microsoft and OpenAI manage to solve this problem, and unless Google responds quickly with another similar proposal, we can see Bing take a long lead, at least in terms of its proposal, for the first time ever.
