Microsoft has just announced a huge update to Bing that overhauls the search engine to put AI-powered answers first.
This means that when a search query is entered, the results page will pop up with a primary AI-generated answer detailing all the curated sources that have been tapped to get that result. You’ll still get the traditional search results on the Bing search page, but they will be presented to the side of the AI-generated material (in a smaller right-hand panel).
This change is currently rolling out to a small number of Bing users, but it’ll presumably become more widely available before too long. From what we can tell there’s no obvious way to turn off the AI results if you wanted to do so.
To those who are curious enough, try setting up a web scraper. Search for innocuous, perhaps popular but simple words, in a Bing image search. Now look at all the URLs and start grouping by domains.
From my experience in the field, Bing has a problem with malicious websites w/ images that pop up in these results and serve fake AV alert phishing sites.
Stay curious y’all, data analytics can be fun and enlightening