2023 was a really important year for Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. It was launched back in 2009 to try to compete with Google, in its more than 14 years of existence it has not achieved significant growth that would allow it to stand as the search engine par excellence. Yes, at that time it was able to overtake Yahoo!, but if we are a little honest, we have to admit that this milestone is more due to the shortcomings of Yahoo! that to Bing’s credit.

I have no qualms about declaring it I think Bing is a good service that has improved a lot over the years and that today it is on par with Google in certain respects. However, it is undeniable that Mountain View earned a more than deserved reputation from the very beginning for how well its search engine worked, at a time when many of these services were still based on a directory modality.

As I say, 2023 has been a very important year for Microsoft’s search engine, and the reason for this can of course be found in Bing Chat, the chatbot based on artificial intelligence that Redmond introduced earlier this year and which, without a doubt, contributed to the complete renewal of the perception of Microsoft’s search engine in the collective imagination. Has this translated into a significant increase in search engine users? The truth is that neither significant, nor moderate, nor insignificant, because according to StarCounter data its market share barely budged in 2023.

Now we have to take into account an important aspect, that chatbot uses are not recorded in the search engine usage counter, so now Microsoft’s intention is to make users of its AI service decide to switch to the “mother” tool, and therefore it must continue to improve it. And as we can read on his official blog, there are good news about him and that’s all Bing is adding a new AI-based feature called Deep Search and which aims, as the name suggests, to help users dig deeper into their search.

Deep Search takes Bing’s existing web index and ranking system and enhances it with GPT-4 to generate natural language text from any input. And what exactly does it consist of? All right in better interpretation of queries and in case of possible ambiguities in them, the search engine will offer us several alternatives with which try to focus the search target, to get more relevant results. If deployed quickly and proven effective, this could be an interesting improvement to consider.