Microsoft Struggles to Gain on Google Despite Its Head Start in AI Search (wsj.com) 27
The new Bing with AI chatbot is "cute, but not a game changer," the data thus far suggests. From a report: When Microsoft unveiled an AI-powered version of Bing in February, the company said it could add $2 billion of revenue if the revamped search engine could pry away even a single point of market share from Google. Six months later, it looks as if even 1 percentage point could be a tough target, with some new data showing Bing's place in search has barely budged -- partly because of how Microsoft handled its high-profile rollout.
In July, Bing had 3% market share worldwide, according to analytics firm StatCounter. That is the same share it had in January, the month before the launch of the new Bing. Another report, from analytics firm Similarweb, shows Bing had around 1% of Google's monthly visitors in July, around the same it had in January. Microsoft is calling the new Bing a success. It disputed outside data, saying third-party data companies aren't measuring all the people who are going directly to Bing's chat page.
In July, Bing had 3% market share worldwide, according to analytics firm StatCounter. That is the same share it had in January, the month before the launch of the new Bing. Another report, from analytics firm Similarweb, shows Bing had around 1% of Google's monthly visitors in July, around the same it had in January. Microsoft is calling the new Bing a success. It disputed outside data, saying third-party data companies aren't measuring all the people who are going directly to Bing's chat page.
When was the last time M$ created anything? (Score:2)
Re: When was the last time M$ created anything? (Score:2)
Re:When was the last time M$ created anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is Microsoft, duh. They don't innovate, simply put. They're masters of corporate games, and do all kinds of buyouts, interference, monopolies, bribes^Wdonations, govt relations, mass astroturfing, etc. They're the reason we have to deal with proprietary software (there were references to software copyrights before Bill's letter, but it's very unlikely they'd gather critical mass, and if free software is ubiquitous, no customer would want an inferior product), software patents, etc. They're the Dick Dastardly of software world, paying billions for cheating, zero for competing honestly. When someone threatens their profits, they are capable of "sponsoring" govt and semi-govt agencies in 100+ countries, such as DDOSing ISO when OpenDocument format became a standard; their action resulted in OOXML becoming a redundant second "standard" then ISO had problems enacting any other unrelated standard as the one-purpose govt bodies lost interest (having been paid only for this one vote). They inject their agents like Elop, Lennart or bluca into companies and organizations. They keep creating fake "cooperations" like UAPI Group [uapi-group.org], injecting mechanisms that purport to do one thing but have promoting their monopoly as the real purpose: ACPI before it got massaged by others into usability, key management for Secure Boot (it currently has unfixed/unfixable flaws for most vendors), current attempt that hopefully got enough pushback being SBAT which hardly hides it can work only for signatures from a single source only. And so on, so on.
So anyone suggesting Microsoft even deigns to innovate is either a sweet summer child or a paid schill.
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I disagree. MS certainly finds new and innovative ways to make things more cumbersome, slower, less secure and generally less useful! They are a major innovator in that space because others engaging in such activities to this degree would likely go out of business pretty fast.
Microsoft is an "also ran" (Score:2)
The only amazing thing here is that Bing somehow managed to get 3% market share.
Microsoft has been marketing to high level management who know about nothing of IT. When it comes to technical competence they are nowhere.
Re: Microsoft is an "also ran" (Score:2)
Taunting the Bing chat bot is definitely fun. It still isn't better than a good search engine for anything other than entertainment value, Bing still isn't a good search engine and the novelty of the taunting decreases after a while.
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Agreed. The reason it hasn't taken off is because people don't want to use a different browser.
I thought my browser was broken (Score:2)
last time I accidentally was forced to use Bing.
I couldn't find any search results among the first 15 advertisements.
Not that Google is doing a better job either with all this SEO stuffing lately.
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Doesn't surprise me occasionally I accidentally do a search in the task bar of windows, it brings up Bing.
People associate Bing with Edge aka the new IE. (Score:5, Insightful)
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People associate Bing with Edge aka the new IE, and therefore don't want anything to do with it. Microsoft made it worse by non-consensually changing people's defaults and forcing browser usage...
Exactly this.
Edge isn't inherently a terrible browser, but the first time you open it, it asks you a bunch of annoying questions, and then puts UI-over-UI as it immediately gives you notifications...it's information overload and a terrible experience, and like you said, Microsoft begs users not to change the default browser and default PDF reader from Edge if you try, *and* it automatically resets it if an automated task attempts to change the default browser, and doing a search for Chrome brings up an "Edge is great!!11" notice.
ChatGPT became the only thing *anybody* wanted to talk about, and shot nVidia stock into the stratosphere, without any of that. It's simply a really good service. It's flawed, but it's a really good service...and people flocked to it in droves.
AI Search could be the best thing since sliced bread, but if the way it's used is a desktop search bar that shows up after a Windows Update and rearranges icons to make room for it...the only thing that will be searched with it is "how do I get rid of this". OpenAI's system didn't need *any* of that to become popular. Given that Google search has become progressively worse over the past few years, all Microsoft needs is for Bing to actually provide desirable results, possibly with a genuinely useful, unobtrusive sponsored listing or two, and they could get that 1% market share easy.
Instead, they try to force it by bothering and confusing users, and it's working for them exactly as well as anyone on Slashdot could have told them it would.
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People associate Bing with Edge aka the new IE, and therefore don't want anything to do with it. Microsoft made it worse by non-consensually changing people's defaults and forcing browser usage...
Exactly this.
Edge isn't inherently a terrible browser, but the first time you open it, it asks you a bunch of annoying questions, and then puts UI-over-UI as it immediately gives you notifications...it's information overload and a terrible experience, and like you said, Microsoft begs users not to change the default browser and default PDF reader from Edge if you try, *and* it automatically resets it if an automated task attempts to change the default browser, and doing a search for Chrome brings up an "Edge is great!!11" notice.
Worse than that, there's no Linux download [microsoft.com].
I mean, who do they even expect to use it without a Linux version?!?
Because Microsoft was so keen on bundling it (Score:2)
to give users 'the best possible user experience' whilst everyone was just looking for 2 products.
I Bing'd It (Score:2)
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Becasue that's dumb.
However, I do use Bing daily and have been for years. It is just as good as Google search and even a little better in some areas.
Will Bing ever catch up? (Score:2)
I think the real problem is that google gained a reputation from the start as the default search engine. It became a generic name like Kleenex. I don't see Microsoft recovering from that.
Apropos of nothing, yesterday I ran into a site with drop-down menus that would not work in Firefox, but would work in Edge. Just sayin', with Edge we appear to be in the "enhance" phase of "embrace, enhance, extinguish". Which means I'll need to keep Edge around somewhere for some websites. Sigh. That's so 1990s.
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Sure maybe. Ok, likely. But the point I was trying to make is that it's already WAAYYYY too late. "Google" has become a common verb in our lexicon.
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Too hard to get to (Score:2)
To use Microsoft's AI, you have to:
1. Use Edge
2. Use Bing
3. Go to the Chat tab in Bing
Almost nobody uses Edge, and just as few use Bing. If they want to get it out there in front of people, they'll have to make it much easier to use, and stop trying to use AI as a hook to get people to *also* use Bing and Edge.
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As for number three, if you just scroll up when at the top of the Bing search page, it will bring up Bing Chat. Just FYI.
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Yes, as a person who has used this functionality daily, I know that I can scroll up. But that isn't obvious to less technical people who might want to try it. They likely don't even realize that "Bing Chat" is Microsoft's AI, they might imagine that it's a page to chat with their friends.
AI added to search doesn't attract new users (Score:3)
I do, however, use AI chatbots to list the main points/themes/areas of a new topic, kind of like an annotated table of contents, before I start searching for valid, reliable, evidence-informed, expert info about them. It's helpful as a rough guide that I can modify as necessary while I learn more about the topic. Of course, this is a useless strategy for recent developments in a particular field but you can at least get some background.
What head start in AI research (Score:3)
Someone is seriously miss-informed. I'm not sure Microsoft has done much AI research, certainly not a lot of any consequence. They purchased a stake in ChatGPT and gave them heaps of CPU cycles, and quid pro quo are now using it in Bing.
But ChatGPT hasn't done much of what I'd call basic research either. They took the the existing design of an LLM (attention heads and whatever) and sunk their time and effort into training it. Don't get me wrong - I'm sure there is a lot of smart engineering went into how they train it, where they get the data, how the curate it and keeping the costs down while they did it. But they didn't do the basic research that came up with the design of the LLM's we use now.
Google did that. They invented the entire shebang in order to power Google translate. Turns out when you translate a word like "plane" to another language you have to know whether it's a miss spelling of plain, or referring to an aircraft, a word working tool, a mathematical two dimensional object a boat skimming the water, or another meaning. To do that you need to understand context it's used in - and thus Google invented the LLM. Not recently either, it was years ago. Then they created customer hardware to power it - the TPU.
I would not be surprised if Google wasn't a decade ahead of Microsoft in AI research.