In an article published on CNET, Microsoft’s Bing search engine is pitted against Google to see how well it performs. The author tries several queries on both search engines and compares the results. In eight out of the ten tests, the author preferred the results produced by Bing, thanks to its AI abilities. Bing has been improved with the help of OpenAI’s language model technology, which has made it possible for Bing to process and generate language better. This makes it more useful for complex queries, where the combination of Microsoft’s web index and OpenAI’s language generation capabilities can be particularly beneficial.
In one test, the author searched for “What’s a good day hike on a road trip from Los Angeles to Albuquerque?” Bing’s top suggestion was a 9-mile trip up Mount Baden-Powell, sourced from a PlanetWare website. This result was considered a huge improvement over the results produced by Google, which only offered generic tourist advice along the route.
In another test, the author searched for “How do I merge two folders on MacOS, including subdirectories?” Bing’s results offered a repackaging of information from the web, including details on using the Finder or MacOS’ ditto command. However, the author preferred the instructions from AppleInsider, which were found through Google’s results and came with screenshots and more comprehensive instructions.
When searching for “What did the US shoot down over Alaska?” Bing offered a summary drawn from multiple news sources about the event, while Google only pointed to The New York Times story. This query illustrates the superiority of Bing, which indexes information recently added to the web, over OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which uses training data from 2021 at the latest.
In conclusion, the author finds Bing to be a breath of fresh air in online search and is impressed with its AI abilities. Bing has already attracted more attention than it has had in years, with over a million people signing up for the AI-powered version. The future of search engines looks promising, with the possibility of more powerful search engines in the future.