Bing Deep Search, an optional generative AI feature meant to help searchers with complex questions that don’t have simple answers, is now fully live for all users. Microsoft announced today that all users can now access Deep Search within Bing Search by clicking on the Deep Search button at the top of the search results page.
Bing Deep Search was originally announced in December 2023 as a search engine that goes deeper on your queries using Bing’s index and GPT-4 to give you more tailored and deeper search results. We then saw it go live briefly in early February, only to be taken down for more testing. It seemed to go live again early this month and now Microsoft is officially announcing its launch.
What is new. Jordi Ribas from Microsoft announced, “Deep search is now available. It uses our existing Bing index and leverages GPT-4 to expand and enhance your query, and determine possible intents. In this example, if your intent is the document camera, then you’d select the top option and get a full page of enhanced results.”
Here is his post:
Deep search is now available. It uses our existing Bing index and leverages GPT-4 to expand and enhance your query, and determine possible intents. In this example, if your intent is the document camera, then you’d select the top option and get a full page of enhanced results. pic.twitter.com/ZSdAVTcjoK
— Jordi Ribas (@JordiRib1) March 22, 2024
Michael Schechter from Microsoft said it is now live for “all users” compared to it going live last time we covered it.
Not for all users
— Michael Schechter (@mikeschechter) March 22, 2024
How it works. Deep Search is built on top of Bing’s web index and ranking system. It then uses GPT-4 to discern all the possible intents and variations behind the query and compute descriptions for each of them to create an “ideal set of results.”
After using a combination of querying techniques, Deep Search will surface results that typically wouldn’t appear in Search results.
Deep Search results ranking. The biggest factor is how well a page matches Bing’s expanded description. A few other relevance and quality factors mentioned were:
- How well the topic matches.
- Whether it has an “appropriate level of detail.”
- Whether the source is credible and trustworthy.
- Freshness.
- How popular the page is.
It is slow, very slow. Deep Search won’t load as quickly as regular search results. It may take Deep Search up to 30 seconds to complete, Microsoft said. This makes the feature sound dead on arrival – as most searchers likely won’t have that much patience.
It does seem faster to run and a lot less buggy than what I saw in early February.
Why we care. This is another variation of using AI for search results. These search results seem like they would drive more clicks than Bing Chat or Google Bard and even Google SGE. But time will tell.
Give it a try, see if you like it and if you find the results fast enough to be useful.
