OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

This might be a trope here, but recently I noticed that the quality of search results has degraded quite a bit for me. When I e.g. search for Golang-related content (often I want just the official docs of a module like net&#x2F;http) I get all these developer-focused, SEO-optimized blogs that are kind of helpful but often not, and I have to scroll all the way down to get the official docs. I really wonder if that has to do with AI-generated content becoming more ubiquitous.<p>I have to say I really dislike all these developer-focused publications, with a few notable exceptions. Most of them just write very shallow articles copied almost 1:1 from the official docs, and don&#x27;t even take care to update their content when stuff changes. I just don&#x27;t get why Google wouldn&#x27;t hand-curate search results like for the Golang standard library or any popular framework and make sure the official docs land on top of the list.<p>So, long story short that&#x27;s definitely an area where ChatGPT will replace Google, if it stays as affordable as it is. Today I e.g. asked it about a decorator-style problem I had in Golang and if there was a solution that could do away with using the &quot;reflect&quot; package and would instead use generics, and sure enough it came up with something that worked brilliantly, tailored exactly to my use case. For me, that is the future of learning about software code (and many other things as well). For publishers probably not so great as people might not go to their sites at all anymore, so I expect a strong upwards trend in anti-automation measures.

The rumour I keep hearing is that it&#x27;s like the Hunger Games inside Google at the moment. Total chaos and infighting at all levels, investors are freaking out over AI and Bard&#x27;s middling performance compared to OpenAI and blood is in the water. Sundar may be forced to resign and Larry&#x2F;Sergei deployed to rescue the company.

While I agree with a bunch of other comments that are interested to see what happens in the long term, to me, all of this points to some <i>profound</i> organizational and cultural problems at Google. I base that statement on things I see as an external observer, from posts I&#x27;ve seen from current&#x2F;ex-Googlers here on HN, and from some (albeit brief) conversations I&#x27;ve had with some of these folks.<p>If a decade ago you told me Microsoft would leapfrog Google in the AI race (obviously albeit through OpenAI, but I think that separate org structure was key in the first place), I would have thought you were insane. Google <i>invented</i> the transformer architecture just 6 years ago. I recently compared ChatGPT (on the free, 3.5 version mind you, not even the 4 version) with Bard, and it wasn&#x27;t even close - ChatGPT was the &quot;Google&quot; to Bard&#x27;s &quot;AltaVista&quot; circa 2000 or so.<p>Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I&#x27;m sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like piling on from the outside, but in all honestly it really feels to me like a classic case of &quot;big company that lost its way&quot;. I can&#x27;t express enough how much admiration and amazement I had for Google that started to tarnish about 10 years ago (I think it was when the whole first page became ads for any remotely commercial search, whenever that started). I honestly hope they are able to course correct (heck, Microsoft had their decade+ of &quot;the Ballmer years&quot; before they turned around).

I feel like I’m missing out on something but other than to summarize text or fill pointless and lazy homework assignments I don’t have much of a use of gpt search. I think I have a trust issue with it and I rather get the raw result and process it myself than to believe that what this model “understood” is right. Anyone else feels this way?

That&#x27;s cool in the short term, but it will be news when it&#x27;s sustained. I logged in to Bing for the first time in forever to play with the AI some, but it didn&#x27;t change my default search behavior of using Google, and now it&#x27;s been easily two weeks since I went to Bing at all.

I believe Google is going to see a major hit and the thing is they can&#x27;t do anything to stop it. They have an incentive to keep search traffic high and unfortunately for them GPT-4 is so good that it gets answers faster with less ads then Google. It&#x27;s similar to how Google disrupted other search engines in the late 90s. I&#x27;m thinking about how I craft my prompt to get the right answer, similar to how I used to think about how I craft the correct keyword search to get the right answer. I have not even tried via bing.com yet just using chat.openai.com selecting gpt-4 and I find much better answers faster then googling... I still google somethings like: &quot;convert 70F to C&quot;... but for help with coding solutions I just ask gpt4

The internet has been creaking under the load of hyper scale SEO content. Content that makes you ask how anyone could let this happen. It’s embarrassing. The internet has had a horrible experience for years now. ChatGPT arrived to finally sift through this mess on our behalf and deliver reasonable experience.<p>Google should have been the one to do this. They invented the tech after all. But they got trapped in the innovator’s dilemma, just like Kodak. Interesting how even with the benefit of history we repeat these mistakes over and over.<p>In the big picture it doesn’t matter. Society still gets the benefit of the tech at the end of the day. The employees play musical chairs as the industry reorganizes and a new order emerges. Life goes on.<p>I am just glad getting information from the internet is pleasant again. Although there is a nagging problem. How are people going to get paid to write content to feed the models? Hmm

This is a case study for an undergrad statistics or responsible journalism class.<p>* for traffic see the small note &quot;all values rebased to 100&quot; they are likely hiding the significance of the increase<p>* for the app downloads graph: does the 30x gap say anything? are there seasonal reasons that can explain why <i>every</i> Jan1--Feb4 has more DLs than Feb4--Mar11 ? e.g., new phones?

Users have to sign in with a Microsoft account to use this. Is that the future? You have to sign up to search?<p>It takes more resources per query to run AI-based search than a search engine. Everybody offering ChatGPT type systems is either pay per view or heavily throttled. We may be in the last days of free search as the dominant product.

15.8% boost vs &quot;near 1%&quot; decline.<p>News title at its finest, the &quot;near 1%&quot; must not make it to the title for maximum effect.

Clawing 1% away from Google&#x27;s market share is likely one of the most challenging moats to cross on the internet. And all it took was creating the singularity.

Bing&#x27;s homepage is full of ads and sponsored content aka news. They have rewards in the top bar. Chat only works on Edge. I just directly use ChatGPT instead of going to Bing.<p>I will continue to use the cleaner look of Google, even if they are a year late to the party.

I can&#x27;t remember the last time I used Google. I use bing chat, and chatGPT for EVERYTHING.<p>I guess I tried Bard briefly, but it was unimpressive.<p>Most surprising statement I&#x27;ve made in 2023 to be honest.

I am one of the people that installed the Bing app because I was told that it would bump me up the waitlist for Bing Chat.<p>I have not used it at all, and this is a reminder that I should probably uninstall it. I have access to ChatGPT, Bard, Alpaca etc. and there’s very little reason at this point to pretend to use Bing in order to get a crack at Chat.

I personally use much less google since Bing Chat came out.<p>That being said it makes me worry a lot. Not that GPT is going to replace me or something, but how effectively it can serve ads to me if it wants. If MS decided to do evil with Bing Chat (which is almost inevitable), it would make today&#x27;s Google look like a charity.

Personally, I haven&#x27;t stopped using Google search first for reasons having anything to do with GPT. My issue is that Google search is now so optimized for ad revenue that it is much less useful as a search engine.

That &quot;15.8%&quot; figure is deceiving.<p>It simply means Bing went from having ~4% market share in search, to now being ~5%.

It&#x27;s also as if google decided to suicide themselves a bit earlier. Their results have really become crap lately. It keeps ignoring anything than 1-2 keywords. What&#x27;s going on?

I went right back to Google. It just had better results.

Team DDG, anyone? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spreadprivacy.com&#x2F;duckassist-launch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spreadprivacy.com&#x2F;duckassist-launch&#x2F;</a>

Title should be &quot;OpenAI tech gives Microsoft&#x27;s Bing a boost in search battle with Google&quot;.<p>Also the very first graph presented shows no change whatsoever in Google&#x27;s use.

I love this (even though I have ~25% of my net worth in $GOOG).<p>Google got fat and lazy. They focused inwards, on promo driven development and executive infighting. This was awful for the tech ecosystem as Google was held out for a long time as the company to emulate.<p>No longer.<p>They’re gonna be forced to actually compete: for talent, for users, for mindshare.

I&#x27;ve been using ChatGPT for a personal project, just a website with some interactive content. Integrating ChatGPT into my workflow boosted my productivity by a factor of 10. Instead of slowly formulating a plan in my head, looking up how to implement different parts piece by piece, and coming through docs, I simply told ChatGPT what the goals of my project were, and asked it to come up with a base. It literally spit HTML, CSS, and JS at me that worked the first try (for the base). It&#x27;s not quite at the level where it can do the full project, but it is astoundingly competent at implementing pieces of it, and that is truly revolutionary.<p>In a nutshell, a project that would have taken me a week took me a day. I&#x27;m sold.

Bing’s search product (ignoring the chatbot) is quite good and comparable with Google. I (and I assume, many people like me) would have never tried it if not for the Bing Chat hype. I find myself using Bing Search more than Google or Bing Chat now.

Wait, only 15.8%?<p>I have changed from not using it ever, at all (or maybe once a year to give it a try), to using it everyday, actually more frequently than Google. And several people I know are in the same situation.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s a regional thing? In Spain no one seems to use Bing, so the bar was very low, I&#x27;m sure the boost here must have been of an order of magnitude at least. But maybe I live in a bubble...

two issues w&#x2F; AI chatbot that I can think of<p>1. Speed, google give me a sub-second result for my query, chatbot requires a few second.<p>2. Content restriction. As shown with chatgpt, chatbot (or other new platform) restricts contents like NSFW, violence, etc. Even TikTok forbids words like suicide, kills to the point they use substitute words like unalive .

Alternate headline: Using every GPU they can lay their hands on, Bing market share still just 3%.

Google trends shows a different picture: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?date=now%201-d&amp;q=%2Fm%2F0bx7rw&amp;hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?date=now%201-d&amp;q=%2...</a><p>Close to no change<p>Who to trust?

Only 15%? I would have expected 1000% increase or so

It’s fun to use statistics to create your narrative.

Sure, to be expected since it&#x27;s a free way to use GPT-4, but I&#x27;m not sure how Microsoft are hoping to monetize this popularity. I suppose they are going to work advertising into it somehow.<p>I guess the Chat UI would allow for advertisements that are displayed for the duration of the chat, potentially very targeted ones (but don&#x27;t want to creep users out by too closely mirroring what they are talking about), but OTOH not clear at all how much chat usage is going to be product&#x2F;service related. Perhaps advertisers don&#x27;t care - as long as they can put the ad in front of your eyes, they don&#x27;t really care whether it&#x27;s apropos of the moment or not.

I looked at my history and I&#x27;d say that my Google searches gone down by 90% in the last week.<p>I actually don&#x27;t feel I have any need to use Google anymore. When I look for something - like a news or a website, I mostly get spam, so I use other search engines. For knowledge I use ChatGPT and if I think something isn&#x27;t right in the reply I use a search engine to compare.<p>I think this is the end for Google.<p>What is interesting to me is that I&#x27;ve been thinking for years how Google is going to replaced, but never though it will be something like ChatGPT and that it will happen so rapidly.<p>I am very very impressed.

Might be wrong, but for a long time search results from Google and Bing in blind tests were basically equivalent. Google’s edge has been its brand recognition and consumer search habits.

On MBA&#x27;s in relation to the hastily launched and then cancelled products: Enron had the same issue.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;albertcory50.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;when-talent-is-not-enough" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;albertcory50.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;when-talent-is-not-enoug...</a><p>on Sundar: I&#x27;ve talked to a few technology journalists, and one said that he&#x27;s met <i>all</i> the top CEO&#x27;s and Sundar was the least impressive of any of them.<p>His days are numbered. What&#x27;s the over-under on when he leaves?

Currently in Bing Chat:<p>- when scrolling down the page goes to Bing Search<p>- when typing predictive suggestions show up<p>I would use Bing even more if I knew how to disable these things. Does anyone know if this is possible?

I always thought Google&#x27;s search would eventually have some kind of serious competitor, but this is not the form I was expecting (Microsoft Bing).

No surprise here. Would like to add that Edge really is a great browser also. Still sticking to Chrome as it feels snappier to me but I constantly open up Edge too.

Look google aint the best but I tried bing for a day and still hated it and an AI chatbot that spews out incorrect info atm isn&#x27;t gonna change my behavior lol

I understand that news sites need clicks, but can we expect regression toward the mean? Bing has a smaller market share therefore it&#x27;s easier to jump 15%.

The latest figure I saw for Bing&#x27;s marketshare was 2.81% [1].<p>That means it has grown to a 3.23% market share, which is still basically total insignificance.<p>People were saying it would lead to a big shift away from Google but those are simply laughable numbers.<p>Call me back when it grows by 500%.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oberlo.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;search-engine-market-share" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oberlo.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;search-engine-market-share</a>

Google is having a Kodak moment.

Google search results have honestly been surprising me with how annoying&#x2F;bad they are for about 3-4 years now.<p>And I&#x27;m still sore about the fact that they moved paid search results from a special column over on the far right side of the page into the main list with all the organic search results.<p>One really gets the sense that when you&#x27;re using Google you&#x27;re the product.

Maybe because Google is actual trash and it went from being the best search engine to being an SEO-infested desert of a search, where your query is interpreted however they want not how you want.<p>Latest example from today - search for &quot;micropython html parser&quot; - 100% of results are about normal python not micropython, with the first 4 results being for generic paid programming courses. It&#x27;s completely useless as a search engine now.

If they’d kept the psychotic “Sydney” version these numbers would be even higher. I promise you they had the end game right there.

That was bound to happen at some point, AI or not. Google search quality has been declining more and more every year, to the point that I&#x27;m almost sure that you could build a better and smaller index for much cheaper with a curated domain list.<p>AI brought down the price to compete from billions to a few millions, the monopoly is being threatened.

This doesn&#x27;t fit into the ChatGPT narrative, but Google&#x27;s most recent search update has been <i>BAD</i> for me. Results are actively worse than from Bing in many cases, to the point that though I haven&#x27;t switched my default yet I often navigate to Bing for many classes of query where Google is useless.

The broader question may not be whether its Bing or Google. People may not be searching anymore to find the sites which can potentially answer a problem&#x2F;query - instead they may just want the answer. GPT&#x2F;LLms may even slow down the whole search engine industry or make it more like chatgpt versions of it.

Yeah, everyone rushed to try these magic search bots. Didn&#x27;t heard anyone who gave up search for these.

I have been using Neeva for few weeks and have been able to stick with it without needing Google too often. Still need to Google when I am searching for things like a restaurant but other than that Neeva has been fairly good.<p>Their AI summaries are helpful most of the times, and SEO spam seems less.

Using Bing app all the time for access to the chat function. Even moved the app to front of home screen.

I&#x27;m honestly surprised it&#x27;s only 15.8%. I can only assume that speaks to how vastly many non-savvy (don&#x27;t care or know about it) there are using it because it came with Edge which came with Windows which came with the computer.

I wouldn&#x27;t doubt google&#x27;s ability to pull this out in the long run, but they seem to need some caffeine in order to wake up to the reality of current competition.<p>Their cloud is not top dog. Their search is losing ground.<p>I guess they have youtube, android, and gsuite.

How does a 3rd party know the traffic figures for Google &#x2F; Bing? I see they are using a service called Similarweb based in Tel Aviv, but its still a mystery to me how you can get this information without access to internal analytics tools

I have to use it on windows with Edge? this is a problem for me, there are also a lot chromebooks these days, and macos desktop&#x2F;laptops, can I use Edge on any OSes and devices now(or in the future)?

Didn&#x27;t Google came up with the model (transformer) used by OpenAI to build their GPT which was then acquired by Microsoft to destroy Google? Sounds too good of a story to be true.

i cant believe google put out such a poor version of bard. everyone will immediately compare results and disregard bard quickly. they made this same mistake with other launches.

Last time I used bing on my grandparents laptop it sent me to scammers instead of the largest cell carrier in the country. AI or not AI, unfocused engineering has no cure

Honestly these numbers are worse than I was expecting for Bing. Can they maintain these numbers when they’re not releasing new products people want to try?

News in 2030: Microsoft acquires Google for $50B.

I can’t even use google to translate a sentence. Their offering has seriously diminished the last 5 years and GPT is a god send.

Google should go back to being strictly links as the results, nothing else. At most 1 paid ad on the top or just below the fold.

I&#x27;m personally using less Google and more ChatGPT. Google results seem irrelevant. this giant could be in trouble

The rise of gpt generated content is no doubt degrading search results, as well.<p>Google must be feeling the squeeze from all over.

Why should I trust these random charts? Where do you get the data from? Feels like sponsored fake news by bing

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;aSFxw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;aSFxw</a>

Microsoft needs to integrate GPT into Windows, and make it available in every app and input box - in the mail app, in Discord, in browsers.<p>You would open Chrome, go to Hacker News, login, and say in the comment box - &quot;GPT, please read this page and make a funny but insightful post about how GPT is a danger to all of us&quot;.<p>In the mail app: &quot;make an excuse to the manager for why I will be late at work today&quot;.

Given how overwhelmingly important Google Search has been to Google&#x2F;Alphabet, are they going to have to start thinking more like a scrappy startup focused on shared goals, and less like a massive entrenched institution that will tend to get steered by careers, OKRs, and promo packets?<p>Or can the existing structure be steered well enough towards good outcomes?

Very confusing and misleading charts. Makes it look as if bing is getting more traffic than google.

The current state of Google is similar to the final days of Altavista. Bad search results.

It is move over google.com moment. The era of ai.com and its ilk (bing&#x2F;skype) has begun -even momentarily.<p>If you are not using ai.com for your everyday information, you are missing out something.<p>The one that asks their questions in a smart way has an edge over people typing random keywords and hoping to learn.

How does a mortal use gpt with bing? I need to install an app?

Too bad it isn&#x27;t a startup eating Google&#x27;s lunch

Sad day for me. Bing actually gives you points to search on their engine. I just cashed in a bunch of points for a $100 gift card. My guess is this program will go away if Bing becomes more popular.

I am very surprised it is that low.

15.8% of nothing is still nothing last i checked...

I signed up to the Bing GPT &quot;beta&quot; waitlist (I hadn&#x27;t logged into my Microsoft account in years) only to be told, days later, that I had to use Edge to try it. I noped out of there.

Good. Google has ruined the web. It has cultivated an insane amount of websites that just have loads of useless cruft around around the information they offer.<p>It has also cultivated a behavior of these stock answers that you see popping up on multiple websites with a reference to THEIR product at the end of the article. I see it with technical problems (partition wizard, windowserrorreport, ...). It&#x27;s your overall run dism &#x2F; sfc and install &amp; buy our product.<p>Then people moved to YouTube, and as a result there are now autogenerated videos for KBs on the internet if you have issues with those. What this means is that whenever you&#x27;re looking for an issue that occurs with a single KB, you get all these generic answers which HIDE potential solutions of other people experiencing the SAME thing.<p>The same applies to pest control, insane amount of lies (dangers of black widows, rabies from squirrels, ...) to get higher in the Google ranks and push their product.<p>Also applies to doctors offices, there are companies who put out these generic pages with &#x27;solutions&#x27; telling you to make an appointment.<p>The worst part about all of this is that Google (and Bing, and DuckDuckGo for that matter) no longer respect me searching for 2 terms. For example, I search for &quot;KB123456 issue&quot;. I&#x27;ll get results for KB123456, but nothing mentioning the issue. And you&#x27;re like: maybe it doesn&#x27;t exist? Except that I read it multiple times half a year ago with the solution, and I was not smart enough to save it somewhere.<p>A search engine used to be to help you search and get your answer, fast and focused. Now it is pulling everything out of the closed to make you deviate from that. Suggestions, audio, video, etc.<p>All while researching something for work. And then I get a Slack message from someone saying &#x27;Hello!&#x27;. And then nothing.<p>&lt;insert head explode gif&gt;