Microsoft Brings Generative Search to Bing in Early Preview

Last night, Microsoft revealed that it has begun testing a new generative search experience in Bing in an -early preview with a select subset of queries.

“After introducing LLM-powered chat answers on Bing in February of last year, we’ve been hard at work on the ongoing revolution of search,” the announcement post on Microsoft Bing Blogs notes. “Bing continues to be trusted by hundreds of millions of users to find information, get answers to questions, and explore their curiosity.”

Using “what is a spaghetti western” as an example of a query that does trigger this new experience, you can see how the proposed interface will work: There’s a generative AI summary of the results on the left half of the display and then the traditional list of blue links on the right. Below the summary are other AI-based content sections that further explore the topic, with sources of the information called out in obvious ways.

According to Microsoft, the new experience combines traditional Bing search results with both large and small language models (LLMs and SLMs), and it “understands the search query, reviews millions of sources of information, dynamically matches content, and generates search results in a new AI-generated layout to fulfill the intent of the user’s query more effectively.”

While one goal of this experience is to satisfy the user’s needs, Microsoft also points out that it won’t harm web publishers, a key concern with other generative search experiences: Bing “maintains the number of clicks to websites and supports a healthy web ecosystem,” the company claims, in part by retaining the traditional results without deemphasizing them. The generative search experience also increases the total number of clickable links on the page.

This is an attempt to solve the problems Google created with its generative search experience, which launched in a similar early preview well over a year ago. (So long ago that Gemini was still called Bard.) Google is currently weighing to make this experience a paid feature.

Bing is an also-ran in web search, but the new generative search experience looks solid. I’ll need to see more examples, of course: The one that Microsoft points out has obviously been optimized for demonstration purposes and may be an exageration of the typical results.