A few months ago, Google’s AI Overviews were all over the news for their inaccurate and, often comical results. This is something that the company is working on fixing, but other companies might be on the way to providing a proper alternative. According to a new report, Bing generative Search might be on the way to becoming what AI Overviews should have been.
In case you don’t know, Microsoft recently revamped the Copilot platform. This brings a new look and some additional features. The platform now has a voice function like Gemini Live and it also has a Vision feature to let it view the world. Right now, Microsoft is testing these features with a limited test group, but we’re not sure when they’re going to make it to more people.
Microsoft Bing also brings a generative search feature
This is one of the features that much of the tech world opposes; when you do a search online, rather than getting a list of sources that you can visit, you’re given a rundown of what you searched for. This eliminates the need to go to these websites, and that greatly reduces the amount of ad revenue that they can earn. While this generative search is proving to be a rather annoying feature, so many companies are so hungry to bring their own takes on it.
Case and point, Microsoft has now deployed its own version of generative search. Much like with Google’s implementation, the AI-generated rundown will appear above the typical search results. It will provide a straightforward and concise answer to the question you asked. Bing’s implementation is a bit different, as users will see several links around the results.
In the image below, we see a title for the search result, and if you click on that title, you’ll see the source where Microsoft got the information. Next to the summary, we also see a YouTube video.
Under the rundown, we also see additional information pertaining to the topic. This information will also contain links to the sources. So, it does a good job of surfacing links, at least.
If you want to try this out, then you can open Bing and type “Bing generative search.” It’s only in the U.S., but it will make it to more places as time goes on.