The search engine is dead

Microsoft announced a new version of Bing with AI-powered chat built in. Google is rolling out its own competitor.

On Tuesday, Microsoft held an event for press, (The Verge has a good recap) where it rolled out a brand new version of Bing, its search engine. If you’re not part of the three percent of people who use Bing, you may not have known that Microsoft has a search engine. It does, even if almost no one uses it. That, it turns out, is the very problem Microsoft is trying to solve.

Image courtesy Microsoft

The new Bing, powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is Microsoft’s attempt to better compete with Google Search. That’s certainly a big lift, considering that Google is the default starting point on the internet for billions of people.

Microsoft, however, has very big ambitions for search, and if it’s right, it’s not at all unreasonable to think that this event will be the type of thing people will look back on in five or 10 years as a defining moment in the progression of technology. At least, it could be the moment people look back on as defining a new era of how we interact with the internet.

For most of the past 20 years, search has been the single most important way we interact with the internet, but also—if we’re honest—the most boring. Sure, there have been changes, but for the most part, those changes have been of the “out of sight, out of mind” variety.

If anything, the most obvious change to search over the past 10 years, or so, is that the quality of search results has declined dramatically, both in terms of the information that ranks highly, as well as the way search engines have increasingly monetized the results page. Search for just about anything and most of what you see are most certainly ads.

Microsoft’s move to incorporate chat into search is not only a bold bet on how people will use the internet moving forward, it represents a huge shift in terms of how that use is monetized. If the company is right, it would upend not only the way people search for information, but also online advertising and how websites attract traffic.

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