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

542 points by carlycue 4y ago

Mizoguchi 4y ago
Didn'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.
jmartrican 4y ago
I went right back to Google. It just had better results.
- csdvrx 4y ago
  Is It Possible to Learn This Power? Because google is 99% spam for me
  - jmartrican 4y ago
    lol. I noticed it depends on what I search for. I typically search for programming issues. Google tends to have the correct Stack Overflow answer up at the top. But I agree a bunch of ads otherwise.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    uBlock plus some filters that remove the ads. Someone also made one that filters out the stackoverflow copy sites.
  - aPoCoMiLogin 4y ago
    it depends how and what you are searching for, I've seen some "spam" with stackoverflow clonse, but that seems to be gone now mostly. I also think that you are exaggerating a lot, otherwise citation needed.
kaicianflone 4y ago
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.
- aix1 4y ago
  How so? I just lazily typed "I'll be late in French" into Google search and got a Google Translate onebox with "je serai en retard". Or are you saying that the translation capability, while available, is not very good?
imranq 4y ago
How does a 3rd party know the traffic figures for Google / 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
techmba 4y ago
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.
Aperocky 4y ago
15.8% boost vs "near 1%" decline. News title at its finest, the "near 1%" must not make it to the title for maximum effect.
- nixcraft 4y ago
  And the title is: "OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google".
- johnfn 4y ago
  I imagine 1% of Google is well more than 15.8% of Bing :)
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Yeah, 0.03*1.16 is still 3% to a close approximation.
- hbn 4y ago
  The graph showing the deviation from each search engine's 100% baseline is kinda telling considering Bing is all over the place with it actually seeing some traffic, and Google is a consistent up-and-down shape that doesn't seem affected at all by whatever is happening with Bing.
eddieroger 4y ago
That's cool in the short term, but it will be news when it's sustained. I logged in to Bing for the first time in forever to play with the AI some, but it didn't change my default search behavior of using Google, and now it's been easily two weeks since I went to Bing at all.
- Filligree 4y ago
  I got access a while back, but haven't tried it yet. I don't have a windows machine to run Edge on.
  - bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
    Thankfully changing your user agent is enough
    - standyro 4y ago
      successfully did this too. it's just a webapp, no real need to restrict to Edge except for Microsoft trying to push their products
  - educaysean 4y ago
    You can use the Bing mobile app as well
  - jasonthorsness 4y ago
    FWIW Microsoft has Edge installers for Linux and Mac as well, I am using it on Debian
    - csdvrx 4y ago
      I'm running Edge on Arch, it works beautifully with wayland
  - erokar 4y ago
    Edge runs on Mac too, with the chat stuff, same as on Windows.
endisneigh 4y ago
It’s fun to use statistics to create your narrative.
netcyrax 4y ago
Yeah, everyone rushed to try these magic search bots. Didn't heard anyone who gave up search for these.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- surgical_fire 4y ago
  I didn't give up, but I'm using search a lot less.
Animats 4y ago
Users have to sign in with a Microsoft account to use this. Is that the future? You have to sign up to search? 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.
- gfd 4y ago
  Google's business model is entirely based off the fact that search is great for signaling intent, and that is great for selling ads. A personalized AI assistant goes WAY beyond that. Whenever you talk to it, it can go into salesman mode to con you into buying shit you don't need. Surely the economics will work out to still provide "free" searches.
  - Animats 4y ago
    > Surely the economics will work out to still provide "free" searches. Only for people with significant spending. Amazon Prime customers, for example.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  I think it's far too early to say where this is going. If you could make this into an extremely skilled targetable manipulator/advocate for any kind of viewpoint, worldview, marketing strategy, on a per-user and day basis, one that subtly pushes the user in a given direction, I'm sure that would be lucrative enough to cover any amount of free/"free" views/prompts. Also, if this takes off in earnest, improving hardware acceleration will probably bring down costs as well.
- CSSer 4y ago
  As Cookies die, Sign-up will rise. Mark my words.
- timeon 4y ago
  ChatGPT also asks for phone.
- 4y ago
braingenious 4y ago
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. 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.
- practice9 4y ago
  ChatGPT doesn't have the browsing plugin enabled yet. Bing can both search/browse the web and generate images interactively by using DALL-E API. There are several drawbacks like a more strict system pre-prompt, 15 messages limit for conversations, and some kind of 24 hours ratelimiting if you use it too often.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    Yeah, there are some differences in capabilities, but they seem to get slimmer on a daily basis. Want an LLM-enhanced search? perplexity.ai is actually pretty cool Want to generate images? There are a ton of free Stable Diffusion sites (for example you.com has that built into their chat), or run it yourself. Want a neat chat experience? ChatGPT is free, Bard appears to have a shorter waiting list than Bing, and Alpaca runs on regular hardware. Bing doesn’t have a big enough moat to force me into using their app. The LLM space is legit competitive and a company can be ahead in the morning and left in the dust by the afternoon. In my opinion, this is what’s happening with Bing at present. Who knows though? Bing might make Chat open while I’m writing this sentence and I’ll have to adjust my opinion accordingly.
- purplecats 4y ago
  as a bonus you get microsoft autoupdate background installations that dont get uninstalled with the removal of edge
TacoToni 4y ago
Using Bing app all the time for access to the chat function. Even moved the app to front of home screen.
favaq 4y ago
I signed up to the Bing GPT "beta" waitlist (I hadn'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.
- standyro 4y ago
  you don't ACTUALLY have to use edge to use it. just use a chrome extension to fake your useragent to pretend to be Edge. I despise needless microsoft hubris
- hbn 4y ago
  You can just install the app on your phone and use it
  - favaq 4y ago
    I'd rather install edge on my computer than type more than one sentence using my phone.
    - someNameIG 4y ago
      On iOS you can use voice search in the app.
Bukhmanizer 4y ago
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?
kevinwang 4y ago
Only 15%? I would have expected 1000% increase or so
- throwyawayyyy 4y ago
  Right? I'd have been entirely unsurprised if Bing saw a 100% increase, given how buzzy all this has been. (Finally, an actual reason to use Bing!) 15% seems like a failure.
henry_viii 4y ago
Currently in Bing Chat: - when scrolling down the page goes to Bing Search - when typing predictive suggestions show up I would use Bing even more if I knew how to disable these things. Does anyone know if this is possible?
culopatin 4y ago
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?
- Invictus0 4y ago
  Yup, and maybe we're just getting old. There are still people on HN complaining about Google removing the OR and AND modifiers, meanwhile the younger generations write queries like "where should I eat breakfast today"
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    I'm fine with writing queries like "Where should I eat breakfast" But I hate seeing the top half of the screen are ads for huge chains, and then the top results are blog posts about "Where are the top 10 places to eat in your city" and not a list of restaurant web pages.
  - detaro 4y ago
    Those aren't really exclusive. Different problems, different query types. (I wouldn't quite do the second example like that, but "where can I get food here" is fundamentally different problem than "I hope there is somewhere out there a bootleg copy of the datasheet for this very weird part and no I don't mean any of these 5 easily-confused other things", which is when the lack/ignoring of detailed modifiers drives you up the wall)
    - Invictus0 4y ago
      I'm just trying to point out that that query would have returned nothing much at all back in the age of keyword-lookup search.
  - bentcorner 4y ago
    I used to try to be surgical with my queries but I've given up and just type a question at my search engine because if that's what they want as a query well they're going to get it.
gambiting 4y ago
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. Latest example from today - search for "micropython html parser" - 100% of results are about normal python not micropython, with the first 4 results being for generic paid programming courses. It's completely useless as a search engine now.
- gtm1260 4y ago
  My mental model has totally shifted to the point where even like dealing with stack overflow feels like a pain compared to just asking gpt-4.
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    Interesting - do you find the results trustworthy?
    - milesvp 4y ago
      I'm curious too. When I go to stack overflow, I get lots of clues as to the trustworthiness of a given answer. I don't know how I'd get any clues from an LLM that its solution is outdated or suboptimal in some way
  - penneyd 4y ago
    Yet without stackoverflow chatgpt wouldn't be particularly helpful
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Doesn't help that many Stackoverflow results at the top of Google had their last answers in...2015.
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    I don't feel stack overflow has been rendered obsolete because the snobbishness and moderation people complain about so much has caused the recommendations on stack overflow to generally be of higher quality than those ChatGPT offers and you have more metadata (answer age, votes) about which answers are especially trustworthy.
dist-epoch 4y ago
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. You would open Chrome, go to Hacker News, login, and say in the comment box - "GPT, please read this page and make a funny but insightful post about how GPT is a danger to all of us". In the mail app: "make an excuse to the manager for why I will be late at work today".
O__________O 4y ago
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.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Also, until recently, Bing's UI was terrible.
abhv 4y ago
This is a case study for an undergrad statistics or responsible journalism class. * for traffic see the small note "all values rebased to 100" they are likely hiding the significance of the increase * for the app downloads graph: does the 30x gap say anything? are there seasonal reasons that can explain why every Jan1--Feb4 has more DLs than Feb4--Mar11 ? e.g., new phones?
seydor 4y ago
It'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's going on?
- DesiLurker 4y ago
  the thing that annoys me most is when it gives a list of completion suggestions & when I not-so-critically select one of them, only to realize it has changed something in the original search terms. Seriously F*k Google for that.
holler 4y ago
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.
- allanrbo 4y ago
  Or ads in yellow boxes on the side, as it used to be
raincole 4y ago
I personally use much less google since Bing Chat came out. 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's Google look like a charity.
nirushiv 4y ago
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.
- mnau 4y ago
  Only in English. For other languages, Bing was and continues to be garbage.
asciimov 4y ago
[flagged]
- HeavyFeather 4y ago
  Over my dead body. You realize that Google Search still brings in mountains of cash, right? Search generates 57% of Alphabet’s total revenue. [1] We’re extremely far from that point. [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-advertising-business-breakdown-.html
t_minus_2 4y ago
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/query - instead they may just want the answer. GPT/LLms may even slow down the whole search engine industry or make it more like chatgpt versions of it.
ModernMech 4y ago
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.
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  What the rate for you? Because for me its 15k points for 10 USD.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    I had over 100k points lol.
realusername 4y ago
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'm almost sure that you could build a better and smaller index for much cheaper with a curated domain list. AI brought down the price to compete from billions to a few millions, the monopoly is being threatened.
jeffbee 4y ago
Alternate headline: Using every GPU they can lay their hands on, Bing market share still just 3%.
ThePhysicist 4y ago
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/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. 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't even take care to update their content when stuff changes. I just don't get why Google wouldn'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. So, long story short that'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 "reflect" 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.
- rcme 4y ago
  My personal opinion is that this has nothing to do with SEO. All those developer-focused blogs serve Google ads, while the official Go documentation does not. Google is trying to boost revenue by promoting results with ads.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    This is exactly it. Google is trying to get people to stay on the pages they click, and they optimize for this behavior, not for utility or for quickly accessing information. If you go to a page and immediately find what you are looking for, Google interprets that as failure. This is why Bing and AI based search can completely beat Google web search, because they are trying to serve the searcher rather than serve ads.
HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
Sure, to be expected since it's a free way to use GPT-4, but I'm not sure how Microsoft are hoping to monetize this popularity. I suppose they are going to work advertising into it somehow. I guess the Chat UI would allow for advertisements that are displayed for the duration of the chat, potentially very targeted ones (but don'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/service related. Perhaps advertisers don't care - as long as they can put the ad in front of your eyes, they don't really care whether it's apropos of the moment or not.
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
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.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
This doesn't fit into the ChatGPT narrative, but Google's most recent search update has been BAD for me. Results are actively worse than from Bing in many cases, to the point that though I haven't switched my default yet I often navigate to Bing for many classes of query where Google is useless.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
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 profound organizational and cultural problems at Google. I base that statement on things I see as an external observer, from posts I've seen from current/ex-Googlers here on HN, and from some (albeit brief) conversations I've had with some of these folks. 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 invented 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't even close - ChatGPT was the "Google" to Bard's "AltaVista" circa 2000 or so. Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I'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 "big company that lost its way". I can'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 "the Ballmer years" before they turned around).
- danans 4y ago
  > Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I'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 "big company that lost its way Former Googler, opinions are my own. They haven't lost their way technologically - as you mentioned they invented the Transformer - and internally Google has long had language models that rival ChatGPT in sheer size and coherence of responses (hallucinations and all). Bard is an intentionally toned down version of LamDa. The reason they didn't release their LLM earlier was likely due to the serious brand risk associated with making it part of Google search. Bing/ChatGPT had no such brand risk, and released their LLMs using the "There's no such thing as bad publicity" logic. That works great as a wrecking ball, but it's not a long term product strategy. So the real institutional problem at Google isn't lack of technological innovation, it's the inability to take major product risks, especially in anything adjacent to Search.
thexumaker 4y ago
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't gonna change my behavior lol
firechickenbird 4y ago
Why should I trust these random charts? Where do you get the data from? Feels like sponsored fake news by bing
swalsh 4y ago
I can't remember the last time I used Google. I use bing chat, and chatGPT for EVERYTHING. I guess I tried Bard briefly, but it was unimpressive. Most surprising statement I've made in 2023 to be honest.
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  This. Also Edge is so so powerful. Especially when I can just drop some content into a webpage, load it in Edge and then click the blue icon in the top right and just ask questions. This is a competitive advantage even over ChatGPT.
  - uejfiweun 4y ago
    Haha, what a surreal thread of comments. If you showed this to someone even a year ago, it'd look like a Microsoft commercial.
- GeoAtreides 4y ago
  > I use bing chat, and chatGPT for EVERYTHING. So you trust EVERYTHING bing chat and chatGPT are telling you? No double-checking at all?
  - swalsh 4y ago
    Bing chat will usually have links in regards to whatever you searched for if you need it. Most of the time I dont.
  - ComplexSystems 4y ago
    If you're talking to Bing Chat and want to double check something, why would you switch to Google? You'd just search for the results yourself in Bing, not to mention that Bing also gives you the relevant search results right there in the chat.
tiffanyh 4y ago
That "15.8%" figure is deceiving. It simply means Bing went from having ~4% market share in search, to now being ~5%.
WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago
Google trends shows a different picture: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&q=%2Fm%2F0bx7rw&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&q=%2... Close to no change Who to trust?
- treve 4y ago
  Assuming this is not a troll, google trends measures how often people search something on google. The URL you linked shows how often people search the word 'Bing' on google. If Bing has an uptick, that doesn't necessarily mean that they first go to Google to find Bing and then do their actual search.
  - WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - cush 4y ago
    Unless their default search engine is Bing it's likely they are using Google to search for it
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  You are looking at a 1 day timeframe, you can very clearly see the increase if you look at 90 days: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=%2Fm%2F0bx7rw,Bing&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=... (included just "Bing" as term too)
  - WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago
    [flagged]
neilv 4y ago
Given how overwhelmingly important Google Search has been to Google/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? Or can the existing structure be steered well enough towards good outcomes?
allanrbo 4y ago
Very confusing and misleading charts. Makes it look as if bing is getting more traffic than google.
eunos 4y ago
two issues w/ AI chatbot that I can think of 1. Speed, google give me a sub-second result for my query, chatbot requires a few second. 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 .
jatins 4y ago
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. Their AI summaries are helpful most of the times, and SEO spam seems less.
o8o8o8o 4y ago
The rumour I keep hearing is that it'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's middling performance compared to OpenAI and blood is in the water. Sundar may be forced to resign and Larry/Sergei deployed to rescue the company.
- GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
  +1 except for Larry/Sergei ever returning, I think that ship sailed about 10 years ago
  - i_have_an_idea 4y ago
    Yeah, I don't particularly see the value of having the founders back - they haven't been hands on for a real long time.
    - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      Larry and Sergey are radioactive post-MeToo. I'm not sure how people manage to constantly forget the extent of their misbehavior and misconduct of Harvey Weinstein-level proportions. But it's there, and if they come out of their private island hidey-holes, they will almost certainly get reminded of it, very publicly. Also, they have absolutely no reason to. Both have more money than they could ever spend in several generations of childrens' lifetimes, and barring the absolute worst case scenario, even a moderately mediocre Google will continue to generate absolutely hilarious amounts of wealth for them for a long time to come. Being a has been like IBM or Oracle isn't going to really harm them much at all.
      - KeplerBoy 4y ago
        Money is not the only motivating factor in this world.
      - throwaway9980 4y ago
        > the extent of their misbehavior and misconduct of Harvey Weinstein-level proportions That’s a pretty significant accusation considering Weinstein is rotting in prison for the rest of his likely short existence. I’ve never heard any of this except maybe one of them had an affair. Can you pull some of this out of the memory hole that it’s apparently been dropped into?
29athrowaway 4y ago
The current state of Google is similar to the final days of Altavista. Bad search results.
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
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. 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's your overall run dism / sfc and install & buy our product. 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'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. 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. Also applies to doctors offices, there are companies who put out these generic pages with 'solutions' telling you to make an appointment. 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 "KB123456 issue". I'll get results for KB123456, but nothing mentioning the issue. And you're like: maybe it doesn'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. 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. All while researching something for work. And then I get a Slack message from someone saying 'Hello!'. And then nothing. <insert head explode gif>
justinzollars 4y ago
I'm personally using less Google and more ChatGPT. Google results seem irrelevant. this giant could be in trouble
bilsbie 4y ago
How does a mortal use gpt with bing? I need to install an app?
taf2 4y ago
I believe Google is going to see a major hit and the thing is they can'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's similar to how Google disrupted other search engines in the late 90s. I'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: "convert 70F to C"... but for help with coding solutions I just ask gpt4
- nicce 4y ago
  > GPT-4 is so good that it gets answers faster The problem is, that if no references are provided, then you need to manually verify the content… by using search engine.
  - taf2 4y ago
    For code - I can read the code and verify myself... If I was asking whether the sky is blue or some other kind of "fact" based question sure... But really how is that different with search? I can look at the website and say ah I trust this website over that other website... I think it's a new flavor of "don't trust everything you hear on the TV" Or in more modern day "Don't trust everything you read on the internet", or "Don't trust everything you hear on social media"... It's just the next iteration... "Don't trust everything an AI tell you". That is no different from me learning from code i find via search but instead ask about via AI...
    - nicce 4y ago
      > "Don't trust everything you read on the internet", or "Don't trust everything you hear on social media" There is a difference. There are places with reputation and backlogs and even with scientific references. But if AI just gives you a text, there is nothing. Until they fix references, you can’t really use it for anything factual, non-logical information.
Euphorbium 4y ago
I am very surprised it is that low.
encody 4y ago
Team DDG, anyone? https://spreadprivacy.com/duckassist-launch/ https://spreadprivacy.com/duckassist-launch/
cush 4y ago
Clawing 1% away from Google's market share is likely one of the most challenging moats to cross on the internet. And all it took was creating the singularity.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  Except they didn't. They only took 0.42% of Google's traffic [1] (probably less than that even, since Google isn't the only other search engine), and this hasn't been even 2 months since it got introduced, which means it's largely driven by hype. [1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-engine-market-share https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-engine-market-share
- DesiLurker 4y ago
  they say first million is the hardest. I suppose this is what google is afraid of, essentially showing that the 'Gods can bleed'. once that is out in open, there would be other players or at least eat into their margins.
fnbr 4y ago
I love this (even though I have ~25% of my net worth in $GOOG). 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. No longer. They’re gonna be forced to actually compete: for talent, for users, for mindshare.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
The latest figure I saw for Bing's marketshare was 2.81% [1]. That means it has grown to a 3.23% market share, which is still basically total insignificance. People were saying it would lead to a big shift away from Google but those are simply laughable numbers. Call me back when it grows by 500%. [1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-engine-market-share https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-engine-market-share
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  From what I've read it is reported that as of 2022, Bing has between 3 and 8 percent of global search.
attah_ 4y ago
15.8% of nothing is still nothing last i checked...
GeekyBear 4y ago
Personally, I haven'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.
bitL 4y ago
News in 2030: Microsoft acquires Google for $50B.
tippytippytango 4y ago
Google is having a Kodak moment.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
datkam 4y ago
Too bad it isn't a startup eating Google's lunch
- surgical_fire 4y ago
  [flagged]
AzzieElbab 4y ago
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
SpacePortKnight 4y ago
Bing'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. I will continue to use the cleaner look of Google, even if they are a year late to the party.
- stevenhuang 4y ago
  For real. There is so much frivolous crap in Edge. All this points nonsense and gamification of search is so off-putting I can't see how this browser is taken seriously. Note the only way to hide the obnoxious bing discover button is to edit the registry... pure insanity.
- qgin 4y ago
  The "rewards" thing is particularly embarrassing.
fortylove 4y ago
I wouldn't doubt google'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. Their cloud is not top dog. Their search is losing ground. I guess they have youtube, android, and gsuite.
tippytippytango 4y ago
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. 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. 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. 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
- Edes 4y ago
  AI based SEO will be way worse, if Bing chat catches on then you'll be wishing to go back to the stuff that was written by humans with a vague understanding of how SEO works. SEO for AI LLMs is basically impossible to figure out as a human, since they are actually just complete nonsense, and the most optimal thing is to mine for phrases that will give you the answer, and OpenAI just sells access to the tools to test for that.
somsak2 4y ago
https://archive.is/aSFxw https://archive.is/aSFxw
harrisonjackson 4y ago
The rise of gpt generated content is no doubt degrading search results, as well. Google must be feeling the squeeze from all over.
AlbertCory 4y ago
On MBA's in relation to the hastily launched and then cancelled products: Enron had the same issue. https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/when-talent-is-not-enough https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/when-talent-is-not-enoug... on Sundar: I've talked to a few technology journalists, and one said that he's met all the top CEO's and Sundar was the least impressive of any of them. His days are numbered. What's the over-under on when he leaves?
varispeed 4y ago
I looked at my history and I'd say that my Google searches gone down by 90% in the last week. I actually don'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't right in the reply I use a search engine to compare. I think this is the end for Google. What is interesting to me is that I'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. I am very very impressed.
chopete3 4y ago
It is move over google.com moment. The era of ai.com and its ilk (bing/skype) has begun -even momentarily. If you are not using ai.com for your everyday information, you are missing out something. The one that asks their questions in a smart way has an edge over people typing random keywords and hoping to learn.
abirch 4y ago
I understand that news sites need clicks, but can we expect regression toward the mean? Bing has a smaller market share therefore it's easier to jump 15%.
TheRealPomax 4y ago
Title should be "OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google". Also the very first graph presented shows no change whatsoever in Google's use.
synergy20 4y ago
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/laptops, can I use Edge on any OSes and devices now(or in the future)?
- synergy20 4y ago
  not a windows user, just did a quick check, yes edge can be installed all other OSes, and bing+chatgpt works there too, nice.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
If they’d kept the psychotic “Sydney” version these numbers would be even higher. I promise you they had the end game right there.
uejfiweun 4y ago
I'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'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. In a nutshell, a project that would have taken me a week took me a day. I'm sold.
Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
Wait, only 15.8%? 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. Maybe it's a regional thing? In Spain no one seems to use Bing, so the bar was very low, I'm sure the boost here must have been of an order of magnitude at least. But maybe I live in a bubble...
OJFord 4y ago
I'm honestly surprised it's only 15.8%. I can only assume that speaks to how vastly many non-savvy (don't care or know about it) there are using it because it came with Edge which came with Windows which came with the computer.
- rafaelero 4y ago
  The Edge requirement and Bing's waitlist are probably slowing things down. Also, people are probably still split between using Bing or ChatGPT.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    True, personally I've only used ChatGPT (I made an account for DALL•E, can't be bothered to create a Bing account), I'm just aware of people excited to try it out, using it, that in many if not all cases are not ordinarily Bing search users. I suppose another thing is that this isn't necessarily (yet) converting into regular search use, I doubt colleagues trying it out for example have changed their default search engine ~overnight, so there's some fun image gen done, some chat queries to test it out, but then they get back to work and the searches for docs or examples or libraries or whatever are just done with whatever they usually use without even thinking about it, I imagine.
jononomo 4y ago
Google search results have honestly been surprising me with how annoying/bad they are for about 3-4 years now. And I'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. One really gets the sense that when you're using Google you're the product.
cfr2023 4y ago
I always thought Google's search would eventually have some kind of serious competitor, but this is not the form I was expecting (Microsoft Bing).

542 points by carlycue 4y ago

Didn'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.

jmartrican 4y ago

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

csdvrx 4y ago
Is It Possible to Learn This Power? Because google is 99% spam for me
- jmartrican 4y ago
  lol. I noticed it depends on what I search for. I typically search for programming issues. Google tends to have the correct Stack Overflow answer up at the top. But I agree a bunch of ads otherwise.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  uBlock plus some filters that remove the ads. Someone also made one that filters out the stackoverflow copy sites.
- aPoCoMiLogin 4y ago
  it depends how and what you are searching for, I've seen some "spam" with stackoverflow clonse, but that seems to be gone now mostly. I also think that you are exaggerating a lot, otherwise citation needed.

kaicianflone 4y ago

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.

aix1 4y ago
How so? I just lazily typed "I'll be late in French" into Google search and got a Google Translate onebox with "je serai en retard". Or are you saying that the translation capability, while available, is not very good?

imranq 4y ago

How does a 3rd party know the traffic figures for Google / 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

techmba 4y ago

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.

Aperocky 4y ago

15.8% boost vs "near 1%" decline. News title at its finest, the "near 1%" must not make it to the title for maximum effect.

nixcraft 4y ago
And the title is: "OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google".
johnfn 4y ago
I imagine 1% of Google is well more than 15.8% of Bing :)
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Yeah, 0.03*1.16 is still 3% to a close approximation.
hbn 4y ago
The graph showing the deviation from each search engine's 100% baseline is kinda telling considering Bing is all over the place with it actually seeing some traffic, and Google is a consistent up-and-down shape that doesn't seem affected at all by whatever is happening with Bing.

eddieroger 4y ago

That's cool in the short term, but it will be news when it's sustained. I logged in to Bing for the first time in forever to play with the AI some, but it didn't change my default search behavior of using Google, and now it's been easily two weeks since I went to Bing at all.

Filligree 4y ago
I got access a while back, but haven't tried it yet. I don't have a windows machine to run Edge on.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
  Thankfully changing your user agent is enough
  - standyro 4y ago
    successfully did this too. it's just a webapp, no real need to restrict to Edge except for Microsoft trying to push their products
- educaysean 4y ago
  You can use the Bing mobile app as well
- jasonthorsness 4y ago
  FWIW Microsoft has Edge installers for Linux and Mac as well, I am using it on Debian
  - csdvrx 4y ago
    I'm running Edge on Arch, it works beautifully with wayland
- erokar 4y ago
  Edge runs on Mac too, with the chat stuff, same as on Windows.

endisneigh 4y ago

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

netcyrax 4y ago

Yeah, everyone rushed to try these magic search bots. Didn't heard anyone who gave up search for these.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
surgical_fire 4y ago
I didn't give up, but I'm using search a lot less.

Animats 4y ago

Users have to sign in with a Microsoft account to use this. Is that the future? You have to sign up to search? 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.

gfd 4y ago
Google's business model is entirely based off the fact that search is great for signaling intent, and that is great for selling ads. A personalized AI assistant goes WAY beyond that. Whenever you talk to it, it can go into salesman mode to con you into buying shit you don't need. Surely the economics will work out to still provide "free" searches.
- Animats 4y ago
  > Surely the economics will work out to still provide "free" searches. Only for people with significant spending. Amazon Prime customers, for example.
dividedbyzero 4y ago
I think it's far too early to say where this is going. If you could make this into an extremely skilled targetable manipulator/advocate for any kind of viewpoint, worldview, marketing strategy, on a per-user and day basis, one that subtly pushes the user in a given direction, I'm sure that would be lucrative enough to cover any amount of free/"free" views/prompts. Also, if this takes off in earnest, improving hardware acceleration will probably bring down costs as well.
CSSer 4y ago
As Cookies die, Sign-up will rise. Mark my words.
timeon 4y ago
ChatGPT also asks for phone.
4y ago

braingenious 4y ago

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. 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.

practice9 4y ago
ChatGPT doesn't have the browsing plugin enabled yet. Bing can both search/browse the web and generate images interactively by using DALL-E API. There are several drawbacks like a more strict system pre-prompt, 15 messages limit for conversations, and some kind of 24 hours ratelimiting if you use it too often.
- braingenious 4y ago
  Yeah, there are some differences in capabilities, but they seem to get slimmer on a daily basis. Want an LLM-enhanced search? perplexity.ai is actually pretty cool Want to generate images? There are a ton of free Stable Diffusion sites (for example you.com has that built into their chat), or run it yourself. Want a neat chat experience? ChatGPT is free, Bard appears to have a shorter waiting list than Bing, and Alpaca runs on regular hardware. Bing doesn’t have a big enough moat to force me into using their app. The LLM space is legit competitive and a company can be ahead in the morning and left in the dust by the afternoon. In my opinion, this is what’s happening with Bing at present. Who knows though? Bing might make Chat open while I’m writing this sentence and I’ll have to adjust my opinion accordingly.
purplecats 4y ago
as a bonus you get microsoft autoupdate background installations that dont get uninstalled with the removal of edge

TacoToni 4y ago

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

favaq 4y ago

I signed up to the Bing GPT "beta" waitlist (I hadn'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.

standyro 4y ago
you don't ACTUALLY have to use edge to use it. just use a chrome extension to fake your useragent to pretend to be Edge. I despise needless microsoft hubris
hbn 4y ago
You can just install the app on your phone and use it
- favaq 4y ago
  I'd rather install edge on my computer than type more than one sentence using my phone.
  - someNameIG 4y ago
    On iOS you can use voice search in the app.

Bukhmanizer 4y ago

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?

kevinwang 4y ago

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

throwyawayyyy 4y ago
Right? I'd have been entirely unsurprised if Bing saw a 100% increase, given how buzzy all this has been. (Finally, an actual reason to use Bing!) 15% seems like a failure.

henry_viii 4y ago

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

culopatin 4y ago

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?

Invictus0 4y ago
Yup, and maybe we're just getting old. There are still people on HN complaining about Google removing the OR and AND modifiers, meanwhile the younger generations write queries like "where should I eat breakfast today"
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  I'm fine with writing queries like "Where should I eat breakfast" But I hate seeing the top half of the screen are ads for huge chains, and then the top results are blog posts about "Where are the top 10 places to eat in your city" and not a list of restaurant web pages.
- detaro 4y ago
  Those aren't really exclusive. Different problems, different query types. (I wouldn't quite do the second example like that, but "where can I get food here" is fundamentally different problem than "I hope there is somewhere out there a bootleg copy of the datasheet for this very weird part and no I don't mean any of these 5 easily-confused other things", which is when the lack/ignoring of detailed modifiers drives you up the wall)
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    I'm just trying to point out that that query would have returned nothing much at all back in the age of keyword-lookup search.
- bentcorner 4y ago
  I used to try to be surgical with my queries but I've given up and just type a question at my search engine because if that's what they want as a query well they're going to get it.

gambiting 4y ago

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. Latest example from today - search for "micropython html parser" - 100% of results are about normal python not micropython, with the first 4 results being for generic paid programming courses. It's completely useless as a search engine now.

gtm1260 4y ago
My mental model has totally shifted to the point where even like dealing with stack overflow feels like a pain compared to just asking gpt-4.
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  Interesting - do you find the results trustworthy?
  - milesvp 4y ago
    I'm curious too. When I go to stack overflow, I get lots of clues as to the trustworthiness of a given answer. I don't know how I'd get any clues from an LLM that its solution is outdated or suboptimal in some way
- penneyd 4y ago
  Yet without stackoverflow chatgpt wouldn't be particularly helpful
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Doesn't help that many Stackoverflow results at the top of Google had their last answers in...2015.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  I don't feel stack overflow has been rendered obsolete because the snobbishness and moderation people complain about so much has caused the recommendations on stack overflow to generally be of higher quality than those ChatGPT offers and you have more metadata (answer age, votes) about which answers are especially trustworthy.

dist-epoch 4y ago

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. You would open Chrome, go to Hacker News, login, and say in the comment box - "GPT, please read this page and make a funny but insightful post about how GPT is a danger to all of us". In the mail app: "make an excuse to the manager for why I will be late at work today".

O__________O 4y ago

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.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Also, until recently, Bing's UI was terrible.

abhv 4y ago

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

seydor 4y ago

It'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's going on?

DesiLurker 4y ago
the thing that annoys me most is when it gives a list of completion suggestions & when I not-so-critically select one of them, only to realize it has changed something in the original search terms. Seriously F*k Google for that.

holler 4y ago

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.

allanrbo 4y ago
Or ads in yellow boxes on the side, as it used to be

raincole 4y ago

I personally use much less google since Bing Chat came out. 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's Google look like a charity.

nirushiv 4y ago

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.

mnau 4y ago
Only in English. For other languages, Bing was and continues to be garbage.

asciimov 4y ago

[flagged]

HeavyFeather 4y ago
Over my dead body. You realize that Google Search still brings in mountains of cash, right? Search generates 57% of Alphabet’s total revenue. [1] We’re extremely far from that point. [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-advertising-business-breakdown-.html

t_minus_2 4y ago

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/query - instead they may just want the answer. GPT/LLms may even slow down the whole search engine industry or make it more like chatgpt versions of it.

ModernMech 4y ago

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.

sourcecodeplz 4y ago
What the rate for you? Because for me its 15k points for 10 USD.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  I had over 100k points lol.

realusername 4y ago

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'm almost sure that you could build a better and smaller index for much cheaper with a curated domain list. AI brought down the price to compete from billions to a few millions, the monopoly is being threatened.

jeffbee 4y ago

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

ThePhysicist 4y ago

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/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. 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't even take care to update their content when stuff changes. I just don't get why Google wouldn'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. So, long story short that'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 "reflect" 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.

rcme 4y ago
My personal opinion is that this has nothing to do with SEO. All those developer-focused blogs serve Google ads, while the official Go documentation does not. Google is trying to boost revenue by promoting results with ads.
- epistasis 4y ago
  This is exactly it. Google is trying to get people to stay on the pages they click, and they optimize for this behavior, not for utility or for quickly accessing information. If you go to a page and immediately find what you are looking for, Google interprets that as failure. This is why Bing and AI based search can completely beat Google web search, because they are trying to serve the searcher rather than serve ads.

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago

Sure, to be expected since it's a free way to use GPT-4, but I'm not sure how Microsoft are hoping to monetize this popularity. I suppose they are going to work advertising into it somehow. I guess the Chat UI would allow for advertisements that are displayed for the duration of the chat, potentially very targeted ones (but don'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/service related. Perhaps advertisers don't care - as long as they can put the ad in front of your eyes, they don't really care whether it's apropos of the moment or not.

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

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.

CuriouslyC 4y ago

This doesn't fit into the ChatGPT narrative, but Google's most recent search update has been BAD for me. Results are actively worse than from Bing in many cases, to the point that though I haven't switched my default yet I often navigate to Bing for many classes of query where Google is useless.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

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 profound organizational and cultural problems at Google. I base that statement on things I see as an external observer, from posts I've seen from current/ex-Googlers here on HN, and from some (albeit brief) conversations I've had with some of these folks. 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 invented 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't even close - ChatGPT was the "Google" to Bard's "AltaVista" circa 2000 or so. Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I'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 "big company that lost its way". I can'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 "the Ballmer years" before they turned around).

danans 4y ago
> Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I'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 "big company that lost its way Former Googler, opinions are my own. They haven't lost their way technologically - as you mentioned they invented the Transformer - and internally Google has long had language models that rival ChatGPT in sheer size and coherence of responses (hallucinations and all). Bard is an intentionally toned down version of LamDa. The reason they didn't release their LLM earlier was likely due to the serious brand risk associated with making it part of Google search. Bing/ChatGPT had no such brand risk, and released their LLMs using the "There's no such thing as bad publicity" logic. That works great as a wrecking ball, but it's not a long term product strategy. So the real institutional problem at Google isn't lack of technological innovation, it's the inability to take major product risks, especially in anything adjacent to Search.

thexumaker 4y ago

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't gonna change my behavior lol

firechickenbird 4y ago

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

swalsh 4y ago

I can't remember the last time I used Google. I use bing chat, and chatGPT for EVERYTHING. I guess I tried Bard briefly, but it was unimpressive. Most surprising statement I've made in 2023 to be honest.

sourcecodeplz 4y ago
This. Also Edge is so so powerful. Especially when I can just drop some content into a webpage, load it in Edge and then click the blue icon in the top right and just ask questions. This is a competitive advantage even over ChatGPT.
- uejfiweun 4y ago
  Haha, what a surreal thread of comments. If you showed this to someone even a year ago, it'd look like a Microsoft commercial.
GeoAtreides 4y ago
> I use bing chat, and chatGPT for EVERYTHING. So you trust EVERYTHING bing chat and chatGPT are telling you? No double-checking at all?
- swalsh 4y ago
  Bing chat will usually have links in regards to whatever you searched for if you need it. Most of the time I dont.
- ComplexSystems 4y ago
  If you're talking to Bing Chat and want to double check something, why would you switch to Google? You'd just search for the results yourself in Bing, not to mention that Bing also gives you the relevant search results right there in the chat.

tiffanyh 4y ago

That "15.8%" figure is deceiving. It simply means Bing went from having ~4% market share in search, to now being ~5%.

WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago

Google trends shows a different picture: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&q=%2Fm%2F0bx7rw&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&q=%2... Close to no change Who to trust?

treve 4y ago
Assuming this is not a troll, google trends measures how often people search something on google. The URL you linked shows how often people search the word 'Bing' on google. If Bing has an uptick, that doesn't necessarily mean that they first go to Google to find Bing and then do their actual search.
- WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago
  [flagged]
- cush 4y ago
  Unless their default search engine is Bing it's likely they are using Google to search for it
iLoveOncall 4y ago
You are looking at a 1 day timeframe, you can very clearly see the increase if you look at 90 days: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=%2Fm%2F0bx7rw,Bing&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=... (included just "Bing" as term too)
- WhereIsTheTruth 4y ago
  [flagged]

neilv 4y ago

Given how overwhelmingly important Google Search has been to Google/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? Or can the existing structure be steered well enough towards good outcomes?

allanrbo 4y ago

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

eunos 4y ago

two issues w/ AI chatbot that I can think of 1. Speed, google give me a sub-second result for my query, chatbot requires a few second. 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 .

jatins 4y ago

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. Their AI summaries are helpful most of the times, and SEO spam seems less.

o8o8o8o 4y ago

The rumour I keep hearing is that it'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's middling performance compared to OpenAI and blood is in the water. Sundar may be forced to resign and Larry/Sergei deployed to rescue the company.

GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
+1 except for Larry/Sergei ever returning, I think that ship sailed about 10 years ago
- i_have_an_idea 4y ago
  Yeah, I don't particularly see the value of having the founders back - they haven't been hands on for a real long time.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    Larry and Sergey are radioactive post-MeToo. I'm not sure how people manage to constantly forget the extent of their misbehavior and misconduct of Harvey Weinstein-level proportions. But it's there, and if they come out of their private island hidey-holes, they will almost certainly get reminded of it, very publicly. Also, they have absolutely no reason to. Both have more money than they could ever spend in several generations of childrens' lifetimes, and barring the absolute worst case scenario, even a moderately mediocre Google will continue to generate absolutely hilarious amounts of wealth for them for a long time to come. Being a has been like IBM or Oracle isn't going to really harm them much at all.
    - KeplerBoy 4y ago
      Money is not the only motivating factor in this world.
    - throwaway9980 4y ago
      > the extent of their misbehavior and misconduct of Harvey Weinstein-level proportions That’s a pretty significant accusation considering Weinstein is rotting in prison for the rest of his likely short existence. I’ve never heard any of this except maybe one of them had an affair. Can you pull some of this out of the memory hole that it’s apparently been dropped into?

29athrowaway 4y ago

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

WirelessGigabit 4y ago

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. 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's your overall run dism / sfc and install & buy our product. 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'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. 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. Also applies to doctors offices, there are companies who put out these generic pages with 'solutions' telling you to make an appointment. 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 "KB123456 issue". I'll get results for KB123456, but nothing mentioning the issue. And you're like: maybe it doesn'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. 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. All while researching something for work. And then I get a Slack message from someone saying 'Hello!'. And then nothing. <insert head explode gif>

justinzollars 4y ago

I'm personally using less Google and more ChatGPT. Google results seem irrelevant. this giant could be in trouble

bilsbie 4y ago

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

taf2 4y ago

I believe Google is going to see a major hit and the thing is they can'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's similar to how Google disrupted other search engines in the late 90s. I'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: "convert 70F to C"... but for help with coding solutions I just ask gpt4

nicce 4y ago
> GPT-4 is so good that it gets answers faster The problem is, that if no references are provided, then you need to manually verify the content… by using search engine.
- taf2 4y ago
  For code - I can read the code and verify myself... If I was asking whether the sky is blue or some other kind of "fact" based question sure... But really how is that different with search? I can look at the website and say ah I trust this website over that other website... I think it's a new flavor of "don't trust everything you hear on the TV" Or in more modern day "Don't trust everything you read on the internet", or "Don't trust everything you hear on social media"... It's just the next iteration... "Don't trust everything an AI tell you". That is no different from me learning from code i find via search but instead ask about via AI...
  - nicce 4y ago
    > "Don't trust everything you read on the internet", or "Don't trust everything you hear on social media" There is a difference. There are places with reputation and backlogs and even with scientific references. But if AI just gives you a text, there is nothing. Until they fix references, you can’t really use it for anything factual, non-logical information.

Euphorbium 4y ago

I am very surprised it is that low.

encody 4y ago

Team DDG, anyone? https://spreadprivacy.com/duckassist-launch/ https://spreadprivacy.com/duckassist-launch/

cush 4y ago

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

iLoveOncall 4y ago
Except they didn't. They only took 0.42% of Google's traffic [1] (probably less than that even, since Google isn't the only other search engine), and this hasn't been even 2 months since it got introduced, which means it's largely driven by hype. [1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-engine-market-share https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-engine-market-share
DesiLurker 4y ago
they say first million is the hardest. I suppose this is what google is afraid of, essentially showing that the 'Gods can bleed'. once that is out in open, there would be other players or at least eat into their margins.

fnbr 4y ago

I love this (even though I have ~25% of my net worth in $GOOG). 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. No longer. They’re gonna be forced to actually compete: for talent, for users, for mindshare.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

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

sourcecodeplz 4y ago
From what I've read it is reported that as of 2022, Bing has between 3 and 8 percent of global search.

attah_ 4y ago

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

GeekyBear 4y ago

Personally, I haven'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.

bitL 4y ago

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

tippytippytango 4y ago

Google is having a Kodak moment.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

datkam 4y ago

Too bad it isn't a startup eating Google's lunch

surgical_fire 4y ago
[flagged]

AzzieElbab 4y ago

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

SpacePortKnight 4y ago

Bing'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. I will continue to use the cleaner look of Google, even if they are a year late to the party.

stevenhuang 4y ago
For real. There is so much frivolous crap in Edge. All this points nonsense and gamification of search is so off-putting I can't see how this browser is taken seriously. Note the only way to hide the obnoxious bing discover button is to edit the registry... pure insanity.
qgin 4y ago
The "rewards" thing is particularly embarrassing.

fortylove 4y ago

I wouldn't doubt google'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. Their cloud is not top dog. Their search is losing ground. I guess they have youtube, android, and gsuite.

tippytippytango 4y ago

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. 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. 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. 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

Edes 4y ago
AI based SEO will be way worse, if Bing chat catches on then you'll be wishing to go back to the stuff that was written by humans with a vague understanding of how SEO works. SEO for AI LLMs is basically impossible to figure out as a human, since they are actually just complete nonsense, and the most optimal thing is to mine for phrases that will give you the answer, and OpenAI just sells access to the tools to test for that.

somsak2 4y ago

https://archive.is/aSFxw https://archive.is/aSFxw

harrisonjackson 4y ago

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

AlbertCory 4y ago

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

varispeed 4y ago

I looked at my history and I'd say that my Google searches gone down by 90% in the last week. I actually don'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't right in the reply I use a search engine to compare. I think this is the end for Google. What is interesting to me is that I'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. I am very very impressed.

chopete3 4y ago

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

abirch 4y ago

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

TheRealPomax 4y ago

Title should be "OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google". Also the very first graph presented shows no change whatsoever in Google's use.

synergy20 4y ago

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/laptops, can I use Edge on any OSes and devices now(or in the future)?

synergy20 4y ago
not a windows user, just did a quick check, yes edge can be installed all other OSes, and bing+chatgpt works there too, nice.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

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

uejfiweun 4y ago

I'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'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. In a nutshell, a project that would have taken me a week took me a day. I'm sold.

Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago

Wait, only 15.8%? 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. Maybe it's a regional thing? In Spain no one seems to use Bing, so the bar was very low, I'm sure the boost here must have been of an order of magnitude at least. But maybe I live in a bubble...

OJFord 4y ago

I'm honestly surprised it's only 15.8%. I can only assume that speaks to how vastly many non-savvy (don't care or know about it) there are using it because it came with Edge which came with Windows which came with the computer.

rafaelero 4y ago
The Edge requirement and Bing's waitlist are probably slowing things down. Also, people are probably still split between using Bing or ChatGPT.
- OJFord 4y ago
  True, personally I've only used ChatGPT (I made an account for DALL•E, can't be bothered to create a Bing account), I'm just aware of people excited to try it out, using it, that in many if not all cases are not ordinarily Bing search users. I suppose another thing is that this isn't necessarily (yet) converting into regular search use, I doubt colleagues trying it out for example have changed their default search engine ~overnight, so there's some fun image gen done, some chat queries to test it out, but then they get back to work and the searches for docs or examples or libraries or whatever are just done with whatever they usually use without even thinking about it, I imagine.

jononomo 4y ago

Google search results have honestly been surprising me with how annoying/bad they are for about 3-4 years now. And I'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. One really gets the sense that when you're using Google you're the product.

cfr2023 4y ago

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