What you need to know about the latest search engine battle.
The recent release of ChatGPT has produced shockwaves, not just across the internet, but across the world. The world as we know it is changing.
As millions have begun to unleash the power of AI, Microsoft and Google have followed suit.
On February 6th, Google announced the new AI-powered Google Bard in one of their blog posts.
Just a day later, Microsoft announced that their new AI-powered Bing is live.
With both giant companies announcing AI-powered search engines within hours of each other, what do you need to know?
The first thing to note is that Bing is live now, there’s just a waitlist. According to Microsoft Corporate VP and Chief Marketing Officer, Yusuf Mehdi, “The new Bing is available today in a limited preview on desktop, and everyone can visit Bing.com today to try sample queries and sign up for the waitlist. We’re going to scale the preview to millions in the coming weeks. A mobile experience will also be in preview soon.”
Google Bard is not quite there yet. ”We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information,” wrote Google and Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai. “We’re excited for this phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard’s quality and speed.”
Google claims that Bard will help make complex information digestible. “Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner,” wrote Pichai. “These new AI features will begin rolling out on Google Search soon.”
Microsoft included a little more detail in their description of what Bing will include. Mehdi wrote, “The new Bing experience is a culmination of four technical breakthroughs:
Next-generation OpenAI model. We’re excited to announce the new Bing is running on a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search. It takes key learnings and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 – and it is even faster, more accurate, and more capable.
Microsoft Prometheus model. We have developed a proprietary way of working with the OpenAI model that allows us to best leverage its power. We call this collection of capabilities and techniques the Prometheus model. This combination gives you more relevant, timely, and targeted results, with improved safety.
Applying AI to the core search algorithm. We’ve also applied the AI model to our core Bing search ranking engine, which led to the largest jump in relevance in two decades. With this AI model, even basic search queries are more accurate and more relevant.
New user experience. We’re reimagining how you interact with search, browser and chat by pulling them into a unified experience. This will unlock a completely new way to interact with the web.
These groundbreaking new search experiences are possible because Microsoft has committed to building Azure into an AI supercomputer for the world, and OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train the breakthrough models that are now being optimized for Bing.”
As far as what this new development means for the relationship between Microsoft and Google, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an interview with The Verge expressed his utmost respect for what Google has done and then said, “I just want us to innovate. . . Today was a day where we brought more competition to search. . . At the end of the day, they’re the 800-pound gorilla on this, which is what they are, and I hope that with our innovation, they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance. And I want people to know that we made them dance, and I think that’ll be a great day.”
To sum it all up, Microsoft Bing and Google Bard seem to be fairly competitive products at this point. Bing has an edge on Bard since it’s ready to go. At this point, only time will tell which will be the better search engine and secure internet dominance. So get on the waitlist for Microsoft Bing and be on the lookout for Google Bard. They’re guaranteed to change the world.
To learn more about any Microsoft product, contact a JourneyTEAM solutions specialist today.