In some years from today, search engines will likely look completely different. The traditional way of showing links to websites that match the search query best, at lest according to the search engine that you are using, is being phased-out.
The replacement comes in form of AI generations. AI takes the user’s query, generates a response and returns it to the user.
Microsoft revealed a new experiment that it runs on Bing currently that is shifting towards this.
When a user runs a search, Bing will use an AI-generated response for the search results page. It is the first thing that the user sees. While there are regular web links attached afterwards, most searches tend to focus what happens above the fold.
So, AI generates a result and Bing shows it to the searcher first. This includes links to sources and Microsoft says that this will drive more traffic to sites than regular search pages. The claim is not backed up, though.
AI generated results do not work equally well on all types of user searches. Search for something new or unique, and you may not get an answer that you find sufficient.
Search for common knowledge, and you may get an answer that you find useful. AI may still hallucinate and display answers that are factually incorrect.
The future of search
For sources to be included in the answers of AIs, they need to allow them to be crawled. Any source that does not, either for exclusive deals with certain companies or for other reasons, won’t have their pages linked by the AI.
While Microsoft says otherwise, it seems clear that this new type of search format benefits larger websites more than smaller ones. Lesser known sites will be pushed further down still, which will likely reduce traffic further to them.
Google, Microsoft, and other search companies are interested in keeping searches on their properties. Direct answers, integrated tools, and other services are added constantly to search engines to keep searchers, and their eyes on ads, on the search engine’s site.
Plenty of smaller publishers have given up in the past already. Remember Freeware Genius? An excellent site for freeware recommendations. The site was heavily punished by Google Search for unknown reasons and died because of that.
Samer, the creator of the site, never found out why his site tanked in first place.
The trend will continue. Bing, Google, and others will use AI to keep searchers longer on their sites.
What about you? Do you find AI results useful?
“For sources to be included in the answers of AIs, they need to allow them to be crawled.”
Crawled by the search engine or from the very user’s browser?
I lack appropriate terminology, sorry.
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What I mean is, will the connections to crawled sites be handled by the search engine as does, i.e. a meta-search engine such as ‘SearX’ (no connections to 3rd-party sites shown in ‘uBlock Origin’) or will those connections be initiated — hence received as such from the crawled sites — from the user’s browsers (and displayed as such in ‘uBlock Origin’)?
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If AI-assisted search and crawling is “proxyfied’ by the search engine then it doesn’t bother me.
Whatever the environment, AI or not, if the results are not biased by the user’s history and, in case of AI-assisted search, independent of what the AI knows of the user, then it doesn’t bother me. To make it short : I refuse tailored search results when these already exist, i.e. tied to the user’s device geographical location, tied to the user’s surfing history as I’ve been told it is with Google (which I avoid).
Tom, sorry for not making this clearer. The AI needs the data, so Microsoft or whoever runs it needs to get their hands on the data. So, it is not something that you can prevent as a user as the process runs on the servers of the company that owns the AI.
OK, martin, thanks.
“(…) the process runs on the servers of the company that owns the AI.”
That’s what I wanted to know. My point is not to prevent the process, only that it be held on the account of the servers, not directly from my device, which means that it is the servers of the company that owns the AI that crawl the sites, not my device : crawled sites see that the crawling comes from the search engine’s AI, not from my IP …
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Tough when lack of correct technical terminology combine with a non-mother-tongue language.
I don’t like AI searches and I don’t like Bing: it’s next to useless and never finds what I’m looking for. Also, the first dozen or so results are all concentrated on advertisers although that might not be apparent at first. To get to the back of the queue so to speak use Millionshort.com which allows you to disregard the first 100,000 results of a given search or any other number you choose: https://millionshort.com/
Apart from search engines, apps like LINE.me or Whatsapp have adopted AI which gives users the option to translate conversations from another language into their own, but they are just so impersonal I find. It’s as if you’re conversing with a robot instead of the person you know and you lose those little mistakes that people make in conversations when they don’t use the right word, but which shows them to be human.
Current search results are bad enough when searching for something specific… All sorts of “matches” that are not relevant because the search engine seems to ALWAYS assume that your query contains a typo…
Worse still the search results are not ordered based on the words in your query so you find closer matches to what you are looking for further down the list of matches…
I cannot see how adding “AI” (which has capabilities nothing even close to what is being claimed by those pushing it onto the unwary public) will “improve” results – more likely trying to find what you are actually looking for will become more difficult
I came across this gem in the group policy editor.
Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Edge > Enable Microsoft Search in Bing Suggestions in the adress bar.
The last sentence in the description reads – “Bing suggestions will be available even if Bing isn’t the user’s default search provider.”
Win 11 23H2
Nobody has mentioned yet that AI searches cost Microsoft up to 10 times more than regular searches. Those AI models are resource- and power-hungry. Google and Microsoft will eventually regret the day when they forced AI on consumers because it is so expensive.
Concerning website crawling bots. Its a standard practice. If you do not allow Google bots on your website, your website will not be included in any Google search results. AI or regular. Deidetected learned this lesson the hard way. Everyone assumed it was a political rebuke from Google, but the man simply neglected to permit Google bots to index his website.
“Samer, the creator of the site, never found out why his site tanked in first place.”
Since I used to visit Samer’s site–https://freewaregenius.com/–daily [that was years ago], I don’t recall his site ever being “tanked” or punished or anything like that. Samer wrote a “resignation article” and said he would be moving on to other things that could “pay the bills.”
He blamed “ad blockers” more so than anything for the demise of his site and declining revenue stream! Sort of like gHacks when it sold itself to Softonic. The readers weren’t donating, and readers used ad blockers.
One can query “freeware genius” even today, and it pops up within the top three results. Maybe he moved the site to a different server. Anyway, he never came back to private tech blogging–I don’t think so.