The Bing vs Google search engine war just got interesting.
Let’s be honest; a week ago, Bing was a joke. At best, Microsoft’s unloved search engine was an irrelevance, at worst an annoyance foisted upon you when trying to use Windows 11.
I can’t have been the only person to laugh loudly in the cinema during the Amazing Spider-Man in 2012 when Peter Parker searched the internet… using Bing. Kids getting incredible super powers due to radioactive spider bites? That’s one thing. Kids using Bing over Google, though? That’s stretching believability too far…
Or is it? On Tuesday, February 7, Microsoft effectively relaunched Bing, which now uses a powerful artificial intelligence tool based on ChatGPT that, the company promises, could change the way we search the internet. Using AI to help people find websites, information, recipes and more could certainly give Bing the, well, edge (sorry), and make finding new things on the web faster, more natural and more enjoyable than ever before.
While the jury is out on whether ChatGPT-powered smarts can revitalise Bing’s fortunes, the announcement did do something that I’ve never witnessed before: it made Bing interesting.
And, I don’t mean ‘interesting’ in the ‘checking out a bloody mass in the middle of the road’ sense, but genuinely interesting. I actually wanted to know more about Bing.
Like my hollow laughter echoing in a multiplex 11 years ago, I wasn’t the only one. I noticed more people talking about Bing on social media and in forums, and articles we published on this esteemed website about Bing actually got traffic. Some of it even coming from people using Bing!
Google Trends still shows growing search for Bing (oh, the irony), and the Bing app saw a huge increase in downloads from the Apple App Store (opens in new tab) after the announcement. If even Apple users are checking out a Microsoft product, you know something is up.
