November 4, 2024 • 44 mins
In 2009, Microsoft announced a new search engine called Bing. What was Microsoft's strategy, how is Bing different from the dominant search engine Google, and what's next?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you So. On May twenty eight, two thousand
and nine, Microsoft's CEO, who at that time was Steve
(00:28):
Developers Developers Developers Ballmer, appeared at the All Things Digital
conference to announce the company's new search engine BING. Previously,
Microsoft's search tool was called Live Search, but like just
about any company not named Google, Microsoft was kind of
fighting for scraps now. At that time, Google boasted a
(00:52):
sixty four point two percent market share for search. Yahoo
took second place with twenty point four percent. Live Search
was quietly in the corner with just eight point two
percent of the market share. Now that's according to CNN's
David Goldman, who wrote about bing's announcement back in two
(01:12):
thousand and nine. To be fair, Google had a heck
of a head start on Microsoft in the search department.
Google Search initially launched in September nineteen ninety eight, and
Microsoft didn't introduce the beta for Live Search until March
of two thousand and six. Though the company had toyed
with search earlier after acquiring the live dot com site
(01:36):
in two thousand and five, and had in fact introduced
ms in search in nineteen ninety nine, but that one
was powered by a third party search provider. It wasn't
Microsoft actually powering the search tools. Well. Google rose quickly
in the ranks of search engines, largely because Google's page
(01:57):
erank system seemed to have an almost supernatural knack for
returning the best search results at the top of the list.
Google was quick to adjust its approach to mitigate web
designers who used every trick in the book to try
and fool search engines into listing their sites. For example,
in ye olden days, a common ruse was to dump
(02:19):
a dictionary's worth of search terms onto a web page,
and usually you would do it in very very tiny
text at the bottom of the page. Sometimes you would
just change the text color to match the background of
the web page so that people couldn't even see that
there was text down there, and it would just be
a pit of seemingly random words. But the goal was
(02:40):
to get a hit on search engines that were crawling
the web, that were just looking for pages that contain
certain search query terms, and sure visitors to that page
were almost certain to get frustrated when they saw that
the thing they were looking for wasn't there. But that
didn't really matter. What mattered was getting that page view
count up so that you could sell ads on the page,
(03:03):
because capitalism. Anyway. Google had been growing its influence in
the search market for years by the time Microsoft launched
Live Search in two thousand and six, and this wasn't
just a case of Microsoft wanting to take a step
from Google's milkshake. In fact, it was more like the opposite,
(03:24):
because since two thousand and three, at least according to
Fortune magazine, Bill Gates, the co founder and former CEO
of Microsoft, was starting to get a real bad feeling
about Google. He noticed that Google had been advertising job
positions that sounded a lot more like a company that
was looking to get into OS design operating system design
(03:45):
rather than just you know, staying in their lane and
focusing on search. Gates sniffed out a potential competitor, and
it was a competitor that was building up momentum, and
that was something he didn't like very much. Now you
might think that what I'm in applying is that Bill
Gates doesn't like competition. Let me be clear, I believe
Bill Gates loves competition because he loves the feeling of
(04:08):
squashing competition out of existence, either through acquiring the competitor or,
if possible, making some deals that absolutely destroy the competitor. Now,
maybe I'm off base. Maybe my perception of Bill Gates
and his approach to business is not at all accurate,
but it sure does feel right to me. But back
(04:28):
to web search. So Steven Sinofsky, who was head of
Windows as well as the Office suite of Productivity Software,
wrote a book last year. It was published. It was
titled Hardcore Software Inside the Rise and Fall of the
PC Revolution, And in that book, among lots and lots
of other stories, he talks about the early days of
(04:51):
Microsoft getting into web search. Sinofsky would be included in
the web search team after it had already formed and
had built to prototype version of the search tool. Christopher Pain,
who would become VP of Windows Live Search, pitched the
idea of a Microsoft search tool way back in February
two thousand and three. He didn't beat around the bush either.
(05:13):
He told his bosses that in order to build a
good search tool, one that could go toe to toe
with Google. It was going to take a huge investment,
like one hundred and fifty million bucks and a year
and a half of work at least, and that didn't
include the creation and maintenance of server farms that would
actually handle all the search traffic. But his pitch got
(05:35):
the thumbs up from his higher ups, and Project Underdog
was a go. So Christopher Pain then said upon the
launch of Live Search, quote, combined with the rich browsing
and integrated searching services delivered by Windows Live Toolbar and
Live dot com, the new search service offers customers the
(05:57):
next generation of unified services today, which doesn't mean much
on the surface, right, But some of those services that
Live Search would offer included the ability to preview search results,
to do image searches, and to create search macros to
customize the experience to the user. So if you had
(06:18):
a very particular way you wanted to go about searches,
you could create a macro for that and not have
to recreate it every single time you needed to use search.
But there was no question that Google was running away
with search, even as Microsoft argued that Live Search was
a more versatile tool than Google was. The hope was
that this new search engine, that Bing, which would replace
(06:41):
Live Search, would rise to the challenge and wrestle away
a good chunk of that dominant market position from Google.
Spoiler alert, that would not happen. So, according to stat counter,
Google currently enjoys an even more dominant position than it
did before. Right when Live Search debuted, Google held you know,
(07:05):
sixty four percent of the global market. Well, stat counter
says that Google today has around ninety percent of the
market share for web search and Bing has less than
five percent. Now, I should add that's from an analysis
of the market from just one company, and in previous
(07:26):
reporting in twenty twenty four, stat Counter indicated that Google
had actually taken a pretty massive hit in market share,
dropping as low as eighty six point five to eight percent. Now,
in an earlier report, that drop was even more drastic.
Stat Counter analyzed and said that it was down to
seventy seven point five to two percent. However, they later
revised that saying that that was an error. But even
(07:49):
at the lowest point, even with the error, like, let's
say that seventy seven point five two percent was actually accurate,
that's still higher than the market share Google enjoyed back
in two thousand and nine when Microsoft first announced BING.
So even if you say, yeah, Google took a big hit,
it's still higher market share than it had when Microsoft
(08:11):
was trying to take a swing at the king. Now.
Some thought that when Microsoft announced BING that it was
really just a rebranding of Live Search, that all Microsoft
had really done was collect the various features of Live
Search under a more unified approach and then rebranded it BING.
And from what I can tell, that's a fairly accurate
(08:34):
take on what had happened. Not that Microsoft didn't introduce
new features, but ultimately this was really an attempt to
have BING be memorable and to stand out because Live
Search just wasn't ringing in the ears of the web
denizens out there, and hopefully BING would be able to
attract curious users who would use it and then find
(08:57):
they preferred Microsoft's approach to Google's. According to a blog
post by trung fon Bing beat out the name Bang
as the actual name for the search tool, that Microsoft
had been debating between Bang and Bang, and that they
chose Bing because well, you know, we use Google as
(09:17):
a verb, right, Like I googled that for you? For example,
if people were to use bang as a verb that, well,
it's best we just leave that one alone. Plus Fn says,
some folks would argue that BING is actually an acronym.
I think this is playful. It's not really an acronym,
(09:38):
but folks enjoy saying it is that being stands for,
but it's not Google. Satya Nadella, who would later go
on to become CEO of the whole Ding dang dern
Company of Microsoft, was put in charge of the development
and launch of BING. He would then go on to
oversee cloud services before becoming ce of the overall company. Now,
(10:02):
in case you're curious, Statista has a different picture of
global web search market share in that as of January
twenty twenty four, it estimates Google holding nearly eighty two
percent of the market and being at a fairly nice
ten point five to one percent, so like double what
(10:22):
stat Counter had suggested. So, according to Statista, Microsoft has
actually made some gains in its overall market share by
switching from live Search to Bang as if you remember,
Live Search was hovering at around eight percent. However, since
Google also saw gains in that time, you could really
make the argument that Microsoft's bump did not come at
the cost of Google. Instead, Microsoft's bump came from Yahoo's decline. Anyway,
(10:48):
back to the announcement. At All Things Digital, Steve Baumer
took the stage and he claimed that quote BING enable
people to find information quickly and use the information they
found to accomp tasks and make smart decisions. End quote.
That is a direct quote. So that's why there's some
mangled syntax in there. I didn't misspeak, that's just what
(11:09):
Baumer said. But what he was saying is that BING
wasn't a search engine, not at all. It's not a
search engine. It was a decision engine. So what does
that mean, Well, I would argue it doesn't really mean
much of anything. Bing operates as a search engine, but
the implication here is that BING would return more relevant
(11:30):
results to queries and less junk and ads, so that
you would actually get the information you needed in order to,
you know, do something else to make a decision. He said,
this is what is relevant when you are searching for
something like People don't search just to search like they're
unless you're just really bored. You're not going onto a
(11:51):
search engine to search random topics. Typically you're searching for
a reason, and it's often so that you can make
a decision about out something. So that's I think what
he meant by a decision engine. This was the tool
you would use to get the information you needed in
order to make that decision. Now, that decision might be
related to, you know, searching for a restaurant or planning
(12:14):
a vacation, or doing a job search or something like that.
And the slogan that they used was bing and Decide.
There were a lot of jokes about being about the
name being, which typically happens in the tech sphere whenever
there's a new tech service or product introduced, Invariably there
are a lot of jokes made about whatever people decided
(12:35):
to name that thing. I'm thinking of, stuff like the iPad. Obviously,
Microsoft's own Zoon MP three player had a feature called
Squirt where you could share a music track with another
Zoom user, and I can't tell you how many jokes
were made about that. So yeah, there were a lot
(12:56):
of jokes being made quickly following this announcement. Now, initially
Bing's search offered four different flavors. If you will, you
could search in health, local businesses, travel, and purchases. So
at the get Go. It had a much more focused
approach to search, and the plan was always to expand
(13:17):
on this and not relegate BEING to some sort of
niche search engine that you'd only use for things like,
you know, shopping online or something, or needing to find
a doctor in your area. They wanted it to be
useful in all different realms, but they had specific subcategories
of search that would, in theory at least, really focus
(13:39):
the results on whatever it is you were looking for.
As Goldman pointed out in that CNN piece I mentioned earlier,
the tool was quote set up to organize search results
in relevant groups rather than as a series of links.
For instance, a search for flight to New York may
yield New York destinations like hotels, restaurants, and museums as
almost a guidebook page end quote. Presumably this was a
(14:03):
decision made not just to provide more utility to the
end user, but also to differentiate Being from Google. And
that's the beginning. We'll talk more about Microsoft and Being
in just a moment, but first let's take a quick
break to think our sponsors. We're back. Bing would present
(14:31):
the user with a pain called the explore pain. That's
pa in e and this pain would include a history
of searches and tools to navigate to specific results relating
to the query, and suggestions for related searches. It's obviously
changed over the years, but I used being to do
a search while I was researching this episode. I did
(14:52):
a search on the history of Being itself, and the
little panel on the left gave me tools to navigate
a Wikipedia article quickly so I could zip over to
relevant sections like history or features. Now I don't typically
use Wikipedia in my research, at least not as a
primary resource. I'll use it to find other resources on occasion,
(15:13):
or to look for more information that flesh's stuff out,
but only then if that material has proper citation so
I can find the actual resources that provide that information.
Because old habits die hard. I'm not saying that Wikipedia
is a bad resource or that's misleading, but rather I
was trained to never use Wikipedia as a main source,
(15:36):
and that training has a firm hole of my behaviors
to this day. So I will read a Wikipedia article
and then follow the resources to read the stuff that
was used to generate those perspectives that are reflected in
the article. But yeah, I still don't use Wikipedia as
a main resource to this day. Anyway, Microsoft made some
(15:56):
big moves with BING. In July two thousand and nine,
after launching, the company reached a partnership agreement with Yahoo,
and BING would be used to power searches on Yahoo,
which was, of course a iconic web portal site. For
the longest time, Yahoo was one of the big names
in search before Google kind of eclipsed it, and this
(16:18):
is not that different from how Google negotiates to be
the default search engine on other platforms, such as the
default search on say, Apple devices. The original deal had
Yahoo agreed to carry BING ads on desktop searches, though
later the companies would renegotiate that so that fifty one
percent of ads would come from BING and the other
(16:39):
forty nine percent could come from Yahoo's Gemini platform or
any other third party company like Google. For example. In
twenty ten, Microsoft made a deal with Facebook so that
visitors on Facebook would get BING search results while searching
within the social network. So if you use the search
tool in face Book, you got BEING results. Similarly, Microsoft
(17:03):
would make a deal with Amazon so that Alexa, the
digital personal assistant, would actually draw from Being search results,
and in that way Microsoft was taking a page out
of Google's playbook, though on a much smaller scale. Still,
every percentage point of market share counts, and by counts,
I mean counts in the form of a couple of
(17:24):
billion dollars in revenue potentially per percentage. Those are huge stakes.
So when I talk about Google having a dominant position
and being being relegated to you know at most around
ten percent of the market share, that ten percent still
represents billions of dollars in revenue. This is a big deal.
So even if Microsoft's not dominating that space, it is
(17:48):
a significant contribution to revenue. So you know, no small
shakes there. In twenty twelve, a few different things happened.
For one thing, Microsoft introduced bing ads. Microsoft also introduced
a refresh in its layout and created what it called
a three column design which is kind of self explanatory,
as well as a search plus social feature or the
(18:11):
social sidebar. Microsoft explained in a blog post that quote
ninety percent of people consult with a friend or expert
before making a decision, whether it's something as simple as
which train will take you uptown or who is the
best dentist in Boulder. Often people are the most trusted
source of information end quote. Now, I don't think that
(18:33):
comes as a shock to anyone. I think anyone kind
of can have a grasp that the opinions of people,
particularly people you know, hold more weight than anonymous information
posted on a website or a search results page. Online
retailers have been leaning on user reviews for decades as
a way to move merchandise. People trust the reviews of
(18:55):
other customers, unless, of course, those reviews end up not
reflecting actual customer experiences but are instead paid reviews. That
becomes a whole issue. But if the information is coming
from a person rather than a company or a soulless
search engine results page, it tends to carry more weight.
So it made sense to incorporate these social elements. So
(19:18):
the new design of Being in twenty twelve would feature
three columns. The leftmost column, the widest one, contained the
core search results for whatever the query was. Then in
the center column, which was a little bit more narrow,
you had the snapshot column. This one would contain relevant
information related to the query. So, for example, let's say
(19:41):
you were searching for information about a potential vacation destination.
Let's say you're on bing and you're doing a search
about Disney World. So the leftmost column you would have
links to things like probably the main Disney World web page,
but the central column could include information to stuff like
flights or details about hotels in the area, or even
(20:03):
restaurants in the area where you can make a reservation.
That kind of thing. Now, the third column, the social sidebar,
contained information pulled from your friends as well as other
enthusiasts or experts that had content that relates to the
search query. So maybe you would search for disney World
and in that social sidebar you would see posts from
(20:26):
your friends, posts from Facebook, for example, of friends who
had gone to Disney World and stayed at a particular hotel.
Let's say they stayed at Disney World's Caribbean Beach Resort,
and you can see what they thought of the place.
You would never have to rely solely on marketing from
Disney itself, right, You could see what actual human beings
felt about the location, and you could use that to
(20:49):
help make your decision. And being could even help you
with this. They could identify folks in your friends circle,
such as on Facebook, who might know more about whatever
it is you were searching for. So if you didn't
find the information you needed or you wanted to have
the opinion of someone you trusted. It could say, Hey,
your friend Bob goes to Disney World all the time.
Ask Bob, Bob's going to give you the straight information
(21:12):
about the Caribbean Beach Resort. Microsoft called its approach always present,
never intrusive, which is important, right, like to be able
to say, Hey, you can leverage your friend group to
get more information about this. We'll even help identify who
those people are. That can come across as pretty creepy. Right.
It seems to suggest that Microsoft knows all about the
(21:33):
interests and experiences of your friends group, and that can
feel pretty intrusive. And Microsoft was trying to get ahead
of that saying oh, no, no, no, no, we're present,
but we're not trying to intrude upon everything. We're just
there as a resource to help you get more information
so you can make your decisions. That's a tricky path
to walk. It is hard to say, yeah, we're going
(21:55):
to point you in the right direction by having you
connect with people you actually know. Oh, but don't worry
about how we know that this is the right person
to talk about this thing. It's tough. Also, Microsoft updated
its slogan for its search engine, so earlier on it
was bing and decide, but in twenty twelve, Microsoft changed
(22:16):
it to bing is for hashtag doing. Microsoft maintained that
more often than not, people weren't just searching for something.
They weren't, you know, using search as the first step
to go down a rabbit hole of information. Typically, instead,
they were using it as the beginning of actually doing
something to take some form of action, as opposed to
(22:38):
just reading about stuff in a somewhat random fashion. If
you're searching for something, it's probably because you have a
plan to do something, whether that's by you know, pet
food or book travel plans, or find a new job,
whatever it may be. It wasn't just I'm just curious
what kind of jobs does Facebook have right now. Over
(23:00):
the following years, Microsoft continued to invest in being Yahoo
would go into further decline and Bing would at least
take up some of that slack. Google would continue to
dominate the search market, but some folks were looking around
for an alternative to Google because, well, for a lot
of reasons, but some folks were looking for it because
(23:22):
Google's incorporation of paid search results was really irritating them. Now,
these are the ads that look like normal search results.
They are designated as ads. It's not like Google is
trying to completely pull the wool over your eyes, but
they typically are at the very top, right where you
would expect the best results to be. That's where the
advertised results are, and for a lot of people, it
(23:45):
can feel almost deceptive to see that the first answers
to whatever your question happened to be are all coming
from sources that paid to be at the top of
the heap, and you might even suspect that none of
those results will contain the best answer for your question,
or even worse that if you were to follow those results,
you would just kind of land on a page that
(24:07):
doesn't address what you were wondering at all. Instead, it's
just looking to convert you into a customer of some sort,
and instead you would have to scroll down past those
paid spots to find the actual results that didn't pay
to be there. They're just rising to the top because
of Google's page rank system. That's not a great user
experience if you feel like you constantly have to skip
(24:30):
the first few results in order to see things that
aren't tainted by the fact that people paid to be there. Plus,
there was this concern of Google scooping up so much
personal information in an effort to target ads more effectively
that it was a threat to privacy. That's a huge issue,
at least for some users it is. I think anyone
(24:52):
who actually spends a little serious time thinking over the
implications of privacy ultimately arrives at a fairly dark conclusion
of about most of the web these days. It's hard
to avoid, particularly if you're talking about companies like Google
or Meta that leans so heavily on advertising as the
majority of their revenue source. These companies have found far
(25:15):
more value in targeted advertising than just general advertising, so
by its very nature, these companies are dependent upon leveraging
your information as effectively as possible in an effort to
make more money. Then there's the perception that Google search
results are just you know, not as good as they
used to be. And it's true that Google changes up
(25:37):
how its search algorithm works on occasion. When I wrote
for how Stuff Works, that was a constant source of anxiety.
Early on, when I worked at HowStuffWorks dot com, that
website consistently ranked very high in search results, at least
for you know, queries that related to stuff that was
on our website. If we had an article about something
(25:57):
about how something worked, and you were searching for something
along those lines, our website often would pop up at
the very top of the search results, and that meant
we got a lot of incoming traffic from people who
were just looking stuff up. And it was always our
goal to make HowStuffWorks dot Com a destination website on
its own. It would be a place for people to
(26:18):
go to just by choice, just to browse around, not
just when they were looking for a specific answer. But
that just was kind of a pipe dream. The simple
truth of it was the vast majority of visitors who
went to how Stuffworks dot Com arrived there via search,
and that meant we were heavily dependent upon how Google
(26:39):
ranked us. And unfortunately for How Stuff Works, our ranking changed,
and it changed while I was actually there. Now, keep
in mind, I've worked the same job since two thousand
and seven, but the company around me has changed like
six times. But yeah, back with How Stuffworks, Google made
some adjustments to its search algorithm and How Stuff Works
did not pop up quite so frequently. Now, I don't
(27:02):
think it was just Google punishing How Stuff Works. I
think there were some complicating factors, the big one being
that at the time we were owned by Discovery Communications,
and some might argue that How Stuff Works had become
kind of a dumping ground for a lot of lower
quality article topics. The writing was still top notch, the
writers were still doing a great job, but the subject
(27:23):
matter of the articles, it just wasn't the type of
stuff that we would typically pitch During our weekly content meetings.
We would get these assignments that would be related to
big ad deals. This is not a joke. There was
one time where we had a package, an ad package
that was related to the topic of towing, as in
(27:44):
towing something behind your car. And I don't remember how
many articles were part of that package. I want to
say it was something ludicrous like eighty articles. Now, that
could just be a drastic exaggeration, but in my mind,
it wasn't that much of an exaggeration because I know
I wrote at least five articles about towing and I
don't even drive, y'all, And that was part of the
(28:06):
issue I think that heard our rankings and Google search.
Another was that we had to write a lot of
articles that were tied to various discovery shows, and some
Discovery shows I really liked. I thought they were high quality,
like MythBusters, for example, writing articles relating to MythBusters that
was fun. But other shows felt less fun like they
were more exploitative, shows that leaned heavily on othering, for
(28:30):
example by taking some people and then saying, oh, aren't
they odd for one reason or another? Or they were
shows that had almost a side show kind of vibe
to them. I'm not going to name any because I
don't want to give any more attention to them. But
there were some shows that I thought I felt really
icky about, and occasionally How Stuff Works authors would have
to write articles relating to that stuff too. Thankfully I
(28:52):
didn't get those assignments, at least not most of the
time anyway. In my opinion, the combination of Google changing
its search algorithm and How Stuff Works generating a lot
of arguably lower quality content, again not because of the
writing but just because of the subject matter, led to
our page not ranking as highly in search results, and
that hurt How Stuff Works a lot. As traffic began
(29:13):
to slow down. Even our fans made note of that.
It became kind of a joke that you would start
calling how stuff works how towing works. But that's all
water under the bridge these days. At last I heard
how Stuff Works had shifted dramatically by firing the entire
editorial staff, switching to AI generated articles, and then using
contractors as editors to give those articles a look see
(29:35):
to make sure they weren't wildly inaccurate. I do not
know if that's still the case, however it may have
changed anyway. Kind of got off topic there, My apologies.
This is something I'm passionate about. Let's take another quick break.
When I get back, I'll straighten out. We'll get back
on topic. We're back. So before I went to the
(30:02):
ad break, I was talking about how there was this
general perception that Google search results just weren't the same
quality as they used to be. And yeah, with How
stuff Works, you could argue part of the reason for
How Stuff Works this particular fate wasn't that Google's results
had declined in quality, but that the content on How
Stuff Works was declining in quality. But generally speaking, people
(30:23):
were saying Google search results just aren't very good, like
I'm not finding what I need to find. So that
led to some people asking for alternatives to Google. They
found that the privacy issue, the advertising issues, those were
just having too big of an impact on the actual
search results. This brings me to an article in Wired
(30:45):
back in twenty eighteen. It was written by Brian Barrett
and it's titled I used only Bing for three months.
Here's what I found and what I didn't Now. Barrett
first used the bing search app, So this is the
mobile app that at the time included specific types of
search ranging from videos to news, to music to gas.
(31:05):
So I guess if you wanted to search for gas
stations that are close to you, you could do that,
or petrol stations if you prefer. You know. Obviously Google
has different subcategories of search as well, like Google News,
so this is not that unusual. But it was a
pretty wild variety of topics that Barrett encountered, and Barrett
(31:26):
claimed that the different tabs led to presentations of search
results and just general content that varied in usefulness and coherence,
like if you navigated to the near me tab, for example,
you would get certain stuff served up to you automatically
before you would even start searching. Same with any of
the others. But he did say the near metab presented
(31:47):
him with an array of things located close by, including
an ar augmented reality style feature where you could hold
up your phone and using the rear facing camera, it
would display results in your screen for plays that were
near you, like in the direction that you were holding
your phone, so you can hold up your phone and
see that maybe down the street there's like a little
(32:08):
Mexican restaurant, and it would include stuff like the rating
for that restaurant and maybe the hours for it, just
by holding up your phone and looking at the screen
as you move your camera around, which is pretty nifty,
particularly for back in twenty eighteen, because we're still talking
about implementations that are essentially the same thing, and it's
six years later now. Now. Overall, Barrett's experiences seemed like
(32:29):
he found the taxonomy and organization of the Being search
app a little weird and haphazard. The actual search was
pretty straightforward, but the stuff that was presented on each
tab like a landing page, that's what seemed very weird
to him. I recommend reading the article to get the
full effect of what he was saying. Again, that's in wired.
(32:50):
I used only Being for three months. Here's what I
found and what I didn't. Now. Barrett said that for
the most part, being delivered search results that were at
least as good as Google's, although there was an exception.
If Barrett searched for a specific article that had been
published on Wired, he found it was really challenging to
get BING to return relevant search results, Like they just
(33:10):
weren't popping up, even if he included several words found
in the headline of the article, or he included the
site like he wrote like in Wired, or if he
included the author who wrote the original piece, and that's
just kind of odd. But otherwise, he said, his take
was quote search is search is search end quote, meaning
that it's pretty unremarkable for the most part, Like, as
(33:32):
long as you're doing it, okay, it's good enough. And
it's not like Google has the market on effective web search.
They just have the market on search in general. Now.
In twenty twenty one, Bloomberg reported that a lawyer for
Google had a bit of ironic information for the world,
and that was that the top searched term on bing
(33:55):
was in fact Google. Now, if that's true, that has
to stay. So why would the lawyer even bring this up? Well,
that was because Google was already in a stew because
regulators around the world were looking at the company's dominant
position and web search something that's still going on today,
and the argument was that Google held the equivalent of
(34:19):
a monopoly, and yeah, if you're hovering around ninety percent
of the market share, you kind of are a monopoly.
I mean, if nine out of ten web searches around
the world are happening on your platform and the other
one out of ten are divided up among all your competitors,
that's a pretty bleak picture as far as competition is concerned.
(34:40):
But Google's response was, Hey, it's not our fault. We
give the best search results. Even our largest competitor, Microsoft
bing sees that the top search query in their own
search tool is for us. How is it our fault
that we're doing it better than anybody else, or how
is it a bad thing? The verge is Mitchell Clark
(35:01):
looked into this in October twenty twenty one and found
that a third party SEO analysis firm called au Refs
AhR EFS backed up what Google's lawyer claimed that Google
was in fact the top searched term on bing, followed
by YouTube, which of course is another Google property. Then
(35:23):
Facebook and then whoopseee back to Google with Gmail. Yikes,
but that's global searches. If you restricted it to US
based searches, it would change. Actually Google fell to third place,
Facebook took the top spot, but still Google being a
top five search item on the BING search tool. That's rough. Also,
(35:46):
here's another fun fact. Bing was the seventh most searched
term on BING, which definitely sounds weird, right, like, why
would someone go to bing to search baning because you're
already there? But as Clark points out in his article,
that could come down to people using a platform that
has being set as the default search engine, but it's
(36:08):
not being itself. So let's say that you know, you're
on a desktop app or a mobile app and BING
is powering the search, but it's not, you know, branded
as BING, then maybe you would search ban in there
to go straight to the BING search page itself as
opposed to just the search bar inside the app. That
(36:29):
makes sense. In fact, that could also be how it's
happening with Google that people want to go to the
Google home page and so they're just typing in Google
in whatever platform they happen to be in, and sometimes
that's powered by bing, So I bet Google is actually
a fairly high search term in Google's own search queries
as well, right, Like, I don't think it's just that
(36:50):
people are on bing and they're like, Oh, I don't
want to be here, let's look for Google anyway. In
late twenty twenty two, Microsoft engineers began to work with
another technology that would change search and this is generative AI.
So before OpenAI began to dominate headlines in late twenty
twenty two, Microsoft already had access to the GPT for
(37:12):
Large Language Model and was probing its capabilities. Microsoft engineers
were really impressed with the performance of the Large Language Model,
and they began working on a search tool that could
tap into those capabilities and combine them with search results.
And they called it Prometheus, which is a humble name
to be sure, that's sarcasm. So Prometheus was a tool
(37:35):
that could mix generative AI responses with search results and
provide answers to a user that, if everything worked as intended,
might give all the information needed for basic queries, or
it could serve as a good start for a deeper
dive into the topic. Microsoft would ultimately develop Prometheus into
a new feature in being called Bing chat a chat
(37:58):
GPT like aiic conversationalist that could answer questions all by itself. Now,
most of the time those answers were perfectly cromulent, to
quote the Simpsons, but in other cases you would get outliers.
You get really weird stuff where the chatbot would present
incorrect or bizarre responses, sometimes like emotionally tinged responses, and
(38:21):
often this fell into the category of hallucinations or confabulations.
In other words, the stuff that where an AI model
starts to statistically select the most likely following word, but
it turns out it's the wrong word or the wrong
series of words, and that you know, just sometimes the
correct answer is an outlier statistically speaking, but AI models
(38:43):
follow the most likely statistical response, and so sometimes you
get weird stuff. Kevin Russ of The New York Times
wrote that the AI powered search propelled Being into becoming
his favorite search engine initially, but he followed that up
with another piece just a little bit later, in which
he said that further interactions with the AI powered chatbot
(39:04):
made him feel kind of unsettled, and it dethroned Being
from being his favorite search engine. To read about his
uncanny chat encounter with Bing. You need to check out
his article from February sixteenth, twenty twenty three, in the
New York Times. It's titled a conversation with Bing's chatbot
left me deeply unsettled. And yeah, he explains like this
(39:27):
interaction convinced him that AI is not really ready for
regular interactions with humanity, that those sort of things can
turn in a way that one are not necessarily helpful
and two can be outright disturbing, Which is an interesting take.
But Microsoft has famously invested heavily in artificial intelligence, so
(39:49):
I don't think we're backing out of AI powered search
anytime soon. It's one of those elements where Microsoft really
believes they can take a solid shot at Google. Google
obviously has also invested heavily in AI powered search, although
Google's attempts have received a lot of ridicule based upon
(40:10):
some bad results. I mean, you know, being told that
the best way to keep cheese on your pizza is
by mixing glue in with the cheese is not great,
not a great look. So yeah, the Google's had its
own setbacks when it comes to generative AI incorporated within search,
and I think Microsoft sees that as a real opportunity
to make a bigger dent in Google's dominance. And again,
(40:33):
when every percentage point is equivalent to a couple of
billion dollars of revenue, that's a worthy endeavor. Notably, Microsoft
is dedicated around fourteen billion dollars into open ai. That's
that's the company that created GPT and chat GPT. But
more recently the two companies appeared to be reevaluating that relationship.
There's been a lot of articles published about how Microsoft
(40:56):
is looking at diversifying its approach to artificial intelligence, that
people at the company executives that the company have started
to question whether it's wise to depend so heavily upon
a partner company for AI capabilities, and that perhaps it
might be better to spread out and look at other
opportunities for AI and not just hit your wagon to
(41:20):
open AI's horse. Meanwhile, open ai has said, hey, should
we ever get to a point where we create artificial
general intelligence, we're severing the relationship with Microsoft so that
they cannot use AGI because we're too worried that Microsoft
would use it for bad reasons and we would get
negative consequences. Also, open ai has reserved the right to
(41:43):
define what AGI is and decide when they get there,
So it essentially feels like it's a bargaining chip that
open ai is saying, hey, unless you continue to fund
us with billions of dollars each year, because AI is expensive,
and if we don't get billions of dollars, we will
spend ourselves out of business. Then we're going to take
(42:04):
our toys and you're not going to be able to
use them, and then you're really going to be behind Google. Again,
that seems to be what's going on, at least from
my perspective at the corporate level, and that's kind of
where BING is right now. Does it become this heavily
AI dependent search tool that can potentially take a big
chunk out of Google's search dominance. It raises other questions
(42:27):
as well, like if a search engine ends up giving
you the material you need without you having to go
through and click on a link, then what good is
the search engine as a search engine? Because if the
traffic is not ultimately going to the companies that host
the information provided to create those answers, then those companies
(42:48):
are ultimately going to go out of business, and then
you no longer have a source of information to pull
from to get those answers that you need in the
first place. So, in other words, the fear is that generative,
a eye powered search will ultimately cannibalize the Internet and
kill the source of info that it depends upon in
(43:09):
order to give us answers, and instead we're going to
get answers that get less and less good as time
goes on, until ultimately we arrive at ideocracy. All roads
lead to idiocracy eventually. Is the saying that I just
made all right on that cheerful note. I hope all
of you out there are doing well. If you are
(43:30):
in the United States and you have not yet voted,
the election day is tomorrow, November fifth. No matter what
flubbs someone might say, it's not January fifth, it's November fifth.
Go out there and vote. Do your research, make an
informed decision. The future of the country depends upon it.
The future of democracy depends upon it. Democracy only works
(43:52):
if people participate in it. So do your research, get
out to your polling place and vote if you haven't already.
And for those of you around the world, I wish
you the absolute best. I hope you're doing well, and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech stuff is
(44:14):
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you So. On May twenty eight, two thousand
and nine, Microsoft's CEO, who at that time was Steve
(00:28):
Developers Developers Developers Ballmer, appeared at the All Things Digital
conference to announce the company's new search engine BING. Previously,
Microsoft's search tool was called Live Search, but like just
about any company not named Google, Microsoft was kind of
fighting for scraps now. At that time, Google boasted a
(00:52):
sixty four point two percent market share for search. Yahoo
took second place with twenty point four percent. Live Search
was quietly in the corner with just eight point two
percent of the market share. Now that's according to CNN's
David Goldman, who wrote about bing's announcement back in two
(01:12):
thousand and nine. To be fair, Google had a heck
of a head start on Microsoft in the search department.
Google Search initially launched in September nineteen ninety eight, and
Microsoft didn't introduce the beta for Live Search until March
of two thousand and six. Though the company had toyed
with search earlier after acquiring the live dot com site
(01:36):
in two thousand and five, and had in fact introduced
ms in search in nineteen ninety nine, but that one
was powered by a third party search provider. It wasn't
Microsoft actually powering the search tools. Well. Google rose quickly
in the ranks of search engines, largely because Google's page
(01:57):
erank system seemed to have an almost supernatural knack for
returning the best search results at the top of the list.
Google was quick to adjust its approach to mitigate web
designers who used every trick in the book to try
and fool search engines into listing their sites. For example,
in ye olden days, a common ruse was to dump
(02:19):
a dictionary's worth of search terms onto a web page,
and usually you would do it in very very tiny
text at the bottom of the page. Sometimes you would
just change the text color to match the background of
the web page so that people couldn't even see that
there was text down there, and it would just be
a pit of seemingly random words. But the goal was
(02:40):
to get a hit on search engines that were crawling
the web, that were just looking for pages that contain
certain search query terms, and sure visitors to that page
were almost certain to get frustrated when they saw that
the thing they were looking for wasn't there. But that
didn't really matter. What mattered was getting that page view
count up so that you could sell ads on the page,
(03:03):
because capitalism. Anyway. Google had been growing its influence in
the search market for years by the time Microsoft launched
Live Search in two thousand and six, and this wasn't
just a case of Microsoft wanting to take a step
from Google's milkshake. In fact, it was more like the opposite,
(03:24):
because since two thousand and three, at least according to
Fortune magazine, Bill Gates, the co founder and former CEO
of Microsoft, was starting to get a real bad feeling
about Google. He noticed that Google had been advertising job
positions that sounded a lot more like a company that
was looking to get into OS design operating system design
(03:45):
rather than just you know, staying in their lane and
focusing on search. Gates sniffed out a potential competitor, and
it was a competitor that was building up momentum, and
that was something he didn't like very much. Now you
might think that what I'm in applying is that Bill
Gates doesn't like competition. Let me be clear, I believe
Bill Gates loves competition because he loves the feeling of
(04:08):
squashing competition out of existence, either through acquiring the competitor or,
if possible, making some deals that absolutely destroy the competitor. Now,
maybe I'm off base. Maybe my perception of Bill Gates
and his approach to business is not at all accurate,
but it sure does feel right to me. But back
(04:28):
to web search. So Steven Sinofsky, who was head of
Windows as well as the Office suite of Productivity Software,
wrote a book last year. It was published. It was
titled Hardcore Software Inside the Rise and Fall of the
PC Revolution, And in that book, among lots and lots
of other stories, he talks about the early days of
(04:51):
Microsoft getting into web search. Sinofsky would be included in
the web search team after it had already formed and
had built to prototype version of the search tool. Christopher Pain,
who would become VP of Windows Live Search, pitched the
idea of a Microsoft search tool way back in February
two thousand and three. He didn't beat around the bush either.
(05:13):
He told his bosses that in order to build a
good search tool, one that could go toe to toe
with Google. It was going to take a huge investment,
like one hundred and fifty million bucks and a year
and a half of work at least, and that didn't
include the creation and maintenance of server farms that would
actually handle all the search traffic. But his pitch got
(05:35):
the thumbs up from his higher ups, and Project Underdog
was a go. So Christopher Pain then said upon the
launch of Live Search, quote, combined with the rich browsing
and integrated searching services delivered by Windows Live Toolbar and
Live dot com, the new search service offers customers the
(05:57):
next generation of unified services today, which doesn't mean much
on the surface, right, But some of those services that
Live Search would offer included the ability to preview search results,
to do image searches, and to create search macros to
customize the experience to the user. So if you had
(06:18):
a very particular way you wanted to go about searches,
you could create a macro for that and not have
to recreate it every single time you needed to use search.
But there was no question that Google was running away
with search, even as Microsoft argued that Live Search was
a more versatile tool than Google was. The hope was
that this new search engine, that Bing, which would replace
(06:41):
Live Search, would rise to the challenge and wrestle away
a good chunk of that dominant market position from Google.
Spoiler alert, that would not happen. So, according to stat counter,
Google currently enjoys an even more dominant position than it
did before. Right when Live Search debuted, Google held you know,
(07:05):
sixty four percent of the global market. Well, stat counter
says that Google today has around ninety percent of the
market share for web search and Bing has less than
five percent. Now, I should add that's from an analysis
of the market from just one company, and in previous
(07:26):
reporting in twenty twenty four, stat Counter indicated that Google
had actually taken a pretty massive hit in market share,
dropping as low as eighty six point five to eight percent. Now,
in an earlier report, that drop was even more drastic.
Stat Counter analyzed and said that it was down to
seventy seven point five to two percent. However, they later
revised that saying that that was an error. But even
(07:49):
at the lowest point, even with the error, like, let's
say that seventy seven point five two percent was actually accurate,
that's still higher than the market share Google enjoyed back
in two thousand and nine when Microsoft first announced BING.
So even if you say, yeah, Google took a big hit,
it's still higher market share than it had when Microsoft
(08:11):
was trying to take a swing at the king. Now.
Some thought that when Microsoft announced BING that it was
really just a rebranding of Live Search, that all Microsoft
had really done was collect the various features of Live
Search under a more unified approach and then rebranded it BING.
And from what I can tell, that's a fairly accurate
(08:34):
take on what had happened. Not that Microsoft didn't introduce
new features, but ultimately this was really an attempt to
have BING be memorable and to stand out because Live
Search just wasn't ringing in the ears of the web
denizens out there, and hopefully BING would be able to
attract curious users who would use it and then find
(08:57):
they preferred Microsoft's approach to Google's. According to a blog
post by trung fon Bing beat out the name Bang
as the actual name for the search tool, that Microsoft
had been debating between Bang and Bang, and that they
chose Bing because well, you know, we use Google as
(09:17):
a verb, right, Like I googled that for you? For example,
if people were to use bang as a verb that, well,
it's best we just leave that one alone. Plus Fn says,
some folks would argue that BING is actually an acronym.
I think this is playful. It's not really an acronym,
(09:38):
but folks enjoy saying it is that being stands for,
but it's not Google. Satya Nadella, who would later go
on to become CEO of the whole Ding dang dern
Company of Microsoft, was put in charge of the development
and launch of BING. He would then go on to
oversee cloud services before becoming ce of the overall company. Now,
(10:02):
in case you're curious, Statista has a different picture of
global web search market share in that as of January
twenty twenty four, it estimates Google holding nearly eighty two
percent of the market and being at a fairly nice
ten point five to one percent, so like double what
(10:22):
stat Counter had suggested. So, according to Statista, Microsoft has
actually made some gains in its overall market share by
switching from live Search to Bang as if you remember,
Live Search was hovering at around eight percent. However, since
Google also saw gains in that time, you could really
make the argument that Microsoft's bump did not come at
the cost of Google. Instead, Microsoft's bump came from Yahoo's decline. Anyway,
(10:48):
back to the announcement. At All Things Digital, Steve Baumer
took the stage and he claimed that quote BING enable
people to find information quickly and use the information they
found to accomp tasks and make smart decisions. End quote.
That is a direct quote. So that's why there's some
mangled syntax in there. I didn't misspeak, that's just what
(11:09):
Baumer said. But what he was saying is that BING
wasn't a search engine, not at all. It's not a
search engine. It was a decision engine. So what does
that mean, Well, I would argue it doesn't really mean
much of anything. Bing operates as a search engine, but
the implication here is that BING would return more relevant
(11:30):
results to queries and less junk and ads, so that
you would actually get the information you needed in order to,
you know, do something else to make a decision. He said,
this is what is relevant when you are searching for
something like People don't search just to search like they're
unless you're just really bored. You're not going onto a
(11:51):
search engine to search random topics. Typically you're searching for
a reason, and it's often so that you can make
a decision about out something. So that's I think what
he meant by a decision engine. This was the tool
you would use to get the information you needed in
order to make that decision. Now, that decision might be
related to, you know, searching for a restaurant or planning
(12:14):
a vacation, or doing a job search or something like that.
And the slogan that they used was bing and Decide.
There were a lot of jokes about being about the
name being, which typically happens in the tech sphere whenever
there's a new tech service or product introduced, Invariably there
are a lot of jokes made about whatever people decided
(12:35):
to name that thing. I'm thinking of, stuff like the iPad. Obviously,
Microsoft's own Zoon MP three player had a feature called
Squirt where you could share a music track with another
Zoom user, and I can't tell you how many jokes
were made about that. So yeah, there were a lot
(12:56):
of jokes being made quickly following this announcement. Now, initially
Bing's search offered four different flavors. If you will, you
could search in health, local businesses, travel, and purchases. So
at the get Go. It had a much more focused
approach to search, and the plan was always to expand
(13:17):
on this and not relegate BEING to some sort of
niche search engine that you'd only use for things like,
you know, shopping online or something, or needing to find
a doctor in your area. They wanted it to be
useful in all different realms, but they had specific subcategories
of search that would, in theory at least, really focus
(13:39):
the results on whatever it is you were looking for.
As Goldman pointed out in that CNN piece I mentioned earlier,
the tool was quote set up to organize search results
in relevant groups rather than as a series of links.
For instance, a search for flight to New York may
yield New York destinations like hotels, restaurants, and museums as
almost a guidebook page end quote. Presumably this was a
(14:03):
decision made not just to provide more utility to the
end user, but also to differentiate Being from Google. And
that's the beginning. We'll talk more about Microsoft and Being
in just a moment, but first let's take a quick
break to think our sponsors. We're back. Bing would present
(14:31):
the user with a pain called the explore pain. That's
pa in e and this pain would include a history
of searches and tools to navigate to specific results relating
to the query, and suggestions for related searches. It's obviously
changed over the years, but I used being to do
a search while I was researching this episode. I did
(14:52):
a search on the history of Being itself, and the
little panel on the left gave me tools to navigate
a Wikipedia article quickly so I could zip over to
relevant sections like history or features. Now I don't typically
use Wikipedia in my research, at least not as a
primary resource. I'll use it to find other resources on occasion,
(15:13):
or to look for more information that flesh's stuff out,
but only then if that material has proper citation so
I can find the actual resources that provide that information.
Because old habits die hard. I'm not saying that Wikipedia
is a bad resource or that's misleading, but rather I
was trained to never use Wikipedia as a main source,
(15:36):
and that training has a firm hole of my behaviors
to this day. So I will read a Wikipedia article
and then follow the resources to read the stuff that
was used to generate those perspectives that are reflected in
the article. But yeah, I still don't use Wikipedia as
a main resource to this day. Anyway, Microsoft made some
(15:56):
big moves with BING. In July two thousand and nine,
after launching, the company reached a partnership agreement with Yahoo,
and BING would be used to power searches on Yahoo,
which was, of course a iconic web portal site. For
the longest time, Yahoo was one of the big names
in search before Google kind of eclipsed it, and this
(16:18):
is not that different from how Google negotiates to be
the default search engine on other platforms, such as the
default search on say, Apple devices. The original deal had
Yahoo agreed to carry BING ads on desktop searches, though
later the companies would renegotiate that so that fifty one
percent of ads would come from BING and the other
(16:39):
forty nine percent could come from Yahoo's Gemini platform or
any other third party company like Google. For example. In
twenty ten, Microsoft made a deal with Facebook so that
visitors on Facebook would get BING search results while searching
within the social network. So if you use the search
tool in face Book, you got BEING results. Similarly, Microsoft
(17:03):
would make a deal with Amazon so that Alexa, the
digital personal assistant, would actually draw from Being search results,
and in that way Microsoft was taking a page out
of Google's playbook, though on a much smaller scale. Still,
every percentage point of market share counts, and by counts,
I mean counts in the form of a couple of
(17:24):
billion dollars in revenue potentially per percentage. Those are huge stakes.
So when I talk about Google having a dominant position
and being being relegated to you know at most around
ten percent of the market share, that ten percent still
represents billions of dollars in revenue. This is a big deal.
So even if Microsoft's not dominating that space, it is
(17:48):
a significant contribution to revenue. So you know, no small
shakes there. In twenty twelve, a few different things happened.
For one thing, Microsoft introduced bing ads. Microsoft also introduced
a refresh in its layout and created what it called
a three column design which is kind of self explanatory,
as well as a search plus social feature or the
(18:11):
social sidebar. Microsoft explained in a blog post that quote
ninety percent of people consult with a friend or expert
before making a decision, whether it's something as simple as
which train will take you uptown or who is the
best dentist in Boulder. Often people are the most trusted
source of information end quote. Now, I don't think that
(18:33):
comes as a shock to anyone. I think anyone kind
of can have a grasp that the opinions of people,
particularly people you know, hold more weight than anonymous information
posted on a website or a search results page. Online
retailers have been leaning on user reviews for decades as
a way to move merchandise. People trust the reviews of
(18:55):
other customers, unless, of course, those reviews end up not
reflecting actual customer experiences but are instead paid reviews. That
becomes a whole issue. But if the information is coming
from a person rather than a company or a soulless
search engine results page, it tends to carry more weight.
So it made sense to incorporate these social elements. So
(19:18):
the new design of Being in twenty twelve would feature
three columns. The leftmost column, the widest one, contained the
core search results for whatever the query was. Then in
the center column, which was a little bit more narrow,
you had the snapshot column. This one would contain relevant
information related to the query. So, for example, let's say
(19:41):
you were searching for information about a potential vacation destination.
Let's say you're on bing and you're doing a search
about Disney World. So the leftmost column you would have
links to things like probably the main Disney World web page,
but the central column could include information to stuff like
flights or details about hotels in the area, or even
(20:03):
restaurants in the area where you can make a reservation.
That kind of thing. Now, the third column, the social sidebar,
contained information pulled from your friends as well as other
enthusiasts or experts that had content that relates to the
search query. So maybe you would search for disney World
and in that social sidebar you would see posts from
(20:26):
your friends, posts from Facebook, for example, of friends who
had gone to Disney World and stayed at a particular hotel.
Let's say they stayed at Disney World's Caribbean Beach Resort,
and you can see what they thought of the place.
You would never have to rely solely on marketing from
Disney itself, right, You could see what actual human beings
felt about the location, and you could use that to
(20:49):
help make your decision. And being could even help you
with this. They could identify folks in your friends circle,
such as on Facebook, who might know more about whatever
it is you were searching for. So if you didn't
find the information you needed or you wanted to have
the opinion of someone you trusted. It could say, Hey,
your friend Bob goes to Disney World all the time.
Ask Bob, Bob's going to give you the straight information
(21:12):
about the Caribbean Beach Resort. Microsoft called its approach always present,
never intrusive, which is important, right, like to be able
to say, Hey, you can leverage your friend group to
get more information about this. We'll even help identify who
those people are. That can come across as pretty creepy. Right.
It seems to suggest that Microsoft knows all about the
(21:33):
interests and experiences of your friends group, and that can
feel pretty intrusive. And Microsoft was trying to get ahead
of that saying oh, no, no, no, no, we're present,
but we're not trying to intrude upon everything. We're just
there as a resource to help you get more information
so you can make your decisions. That's a tricky path
to walk. It is hard to say, yeah, we're going
(21:55):
to point you in the right direction by having you
connect with people you actually know. Oh, but don't worry
about how we know that this is the right person
to talk about this thing. It's tough. Also, Microsoft updated
its slogan for its search engine, so earlier on it
was bing and decide, but in twenty twelve, Microsoft changed
(22:16):
it to bing is for hashtag doing. Microsoft maintained that
more often than not, people weren't just searching for something.
They weren't, you know, using search as the first step
to go down a rabbit hole of information. Typically, instead,
they were using it as the beginning of actually doing
something to take some form of action, as opposed to
(22:38):
just reading about stuff in a somewhat random fashion. If
you're searching for something, it's probably because you have a
plan to do something, whether that's by you know, pet
food or book travel plans, or find a new job,
whatever it may be. It wasn't just I'm just curious
what kind of jobs does Facebook have right now. Over
(23:00):
the following years, Microsoft continued to invest in being Yahoo
would go into further decline and Bing would at least
take up some of that slack. Google would continue to
dominate the search market, but some folks were looking around
for an alternative to Google because, well, for a lot
of reasons, but some folks were looking for it because
(23:22):
Google's incorporation of paid search results was really irritating them. Now,
these are the ads that look like normal search results.
They are designated as ads. It's not like Google is
trying to completely pull the wool over your eyes, but
they typically are at the very top, right where you
would expect the best results to be. That's where the
advertised results are, and for a lot of people, it
(23:45):
can feel almost deceptive to see that the first answers
to whatever your question happened to be are all coming
from sources that paid to be at the top of
the heap, and you might even suspect that none of
those results will contain the best answer for your question,
or even worse that if you were to follow those results,
you would just kind of land on a page that
(24:07):
doesn't address what you were wondering at all. Instead, it's
just looking to convert you into a customer of some sort,
and instead you would have to scroll down past those
paid spots to find the actual results that didn't pay
to be there. They're just rising to the top because
of Google's page rank system. That's not a great user
experience if you feel like you constantly have to skip
(24:30):
the first few results in order to see things that
aren't tainted by the fact that people paid to be there. Plus,
there was this concern of Google scooping up so much
personal information in an effort to target ads more effectively
that it was a threat to privacy. That's a huge issue,
at least for some users it is. I think anyone
(24:52):
who actually spends a little serious time thinking over the
implications of privacy ultimately arrives at a fairly dark conclusion
of about most of the web these days. It's hard
to avoid, particularly if you're talking about companies like Google
or Meta that leans so heavily on advertising as the
majority of their revenue source. These companies have found far
(25:15):
more value in targeted advertising than just general advertising, so
by its very nature, these companies are dependent upon leveraging
your information as effectively as possible in an effort to
make more money. Then there's the perception that Google search
results are just you know, not as good as they
used to be. And it's true that Google changes up
(25:37):
how its search algorithm works on occasion. When I wrote
for how Stuff Works, that was a constant source of anxiety.
Early on, when I worked at HowStuffWorks dot com, that
website consistently ranked very high in search results, at least
for you know, queries that related to stuff that was
on our website. If we had an article about something
(25:57):
about how something worked, and you were searching for something
along those lines, our website often would pop up at
the very top of the search results, and that meant
we got a lot of incoming traffic from people who
were just looking stuff up. And it was always our
goal to make HowStuffWorks dot Com a destination website on
its own. It would be a place for people to
(26:18):
go to just by choice, just to browse around, not
just when they were looking for a specific answer. But
that just was kind of a pipe dream. The simple
truth of it was the vast majority of visitors who
went to how Stuffworks dot Com arrived there via search,
and that meant we were heavily dependent upon how Google
(26:39):
ranked us. And unfortunately for How Stuff Works, our ranking changed,
and it changed while I was actually there. Now, keep
in mind, I've worked the same job since two thousand
and seven, but the company around me has changed like
six times. But yeah, back with How Stuffworks, Google made
some adjustments to its search algorithm and How Stuff Works
did not pop up quite so frequently. Now, I don't
(27:02):
think it was just Google punishing How Stuff Works. I
think there were some complicating factors, the big one being
that at the time we were owned by Discovery Communications,
and some might argue that How Stuff Works had become
kind of a dumping ground for a lot of lower
quality article topics. The writing was still top notch, the
writers were still doing a great job, but the subject
(27:23):
matter of the articles, it just wasn't the type of
stuff that we would typically pitch During our weekly content meetings.
We would get these assignments that would be related to
big ad deals. This is not a joke. There was
one time where we had a package, an ad package
that was related to the topic of towing, as in
(27:44):
towing something behind your car. And I don't remember how
many articles were part of that package. I want to
say it was something ludicrous like eighty articles. Now, that
could just be a drastic exaggeration, but in my mind,
it wasn't that much of an exaggeration because I know
I wrote at least five articles about towing and I
don't even drive, y'all, And that was part of the
(28:06):
issue I think that heard our rankings and Google search.
Another was that we had to write a lot of
articles that were tied to various discovery shows, and some
Discovery shows I really liked. I thought they were high quality,
like MythBusters, for example, writing articles relating to MythBusters that
was fun. But other shows felt less fun like they
were more exploitative, shows that leaned heavily on othering, for
(28:30):
example by taking some people and then saying, oh, aren't
they odd for one reason or another? Or they were
shows that had almost a side show kind of vibe
to them. I'm not going to name any because I
don't want to give any more attention to them. But
there were some shows that I thought I felt really
icky about, and occasionally How Stuff Works authors would have
to write articles relating to that stuff too. Thankfully I
(28:52):
didn't get those assignments, at least not most of the
time anyway. In my opinion, the combination of Google changing
its search algorithm and How Stuff Works generating a lot
of arguably lower quality content, again not because of the
writing but just because of the subject matter, led to
our page not ranking as highly in search results, and
that hurt How Stuff Works a lot. As traffic began
(29:13):
to slow down. Even our fans made note of that.
It became kind of a joke that you would start
calling how stuff works how towing works. But that's all
water under the bridge these days. At last I heard
how Stuff Works had shifted dramatically by firing the entire
editorial staff, switching to AI generated articles, and then using
contractors as editors to give those articles a look see
(29:35):
to make sure they weren't wildly inaccurate. I do not
know if that's still the case, however it may have
changed anyway. Kind of got off topic there, My apologies.
This is something I'm passionate about. Let's take another quick break.
When I get back, I'll straighten out. We'll get back
on topic. We're back. So before I went to the
(30:02):
ad break, I was talking about how there was this
general perception that Google search results just weren't the same
quality as they used to be. And yeah, with How
stuff Works, you could argue part of the reason for
How Stuff Works this particular fate wasn't that Google's results
had declined in quality, but that the content on How
Stuff Works was declining in quality. But generally speaking, people
(30:23):
were saying Google search results just aren't very good, like
I'm not finding what I need to find. So that
led to some people asking for alternatives to Google. They
found that the privacy issue, the advertising issues, those were
just having too big of an impact on the actual
search results. This brings me to an article in Wired
(30:45):
back in twenty eighteen. It was written by Brian Barrett
and it's titled I used only Bing for three months.
Here's what I found and what I didn't Now. Barrett
first used the bing search app, So this is the
mobile app that at the time included specific types of
search ranging from videos to news, to music to gas.
(31:05):
So I guess if you wanted to search for gas
stations that are close to you, you could do that,
or petrol stations if you prefer. You know. Obviously Google
has different subcategories of search as well, like Google News,
so this is not that unusual. But it was a
pretty wild variety of topics that Barrett encountered, and Barrett
(31:26):
claimed that the different tabs led to presentations of search
results and just general content that varied in usefulness and coherence,
like if you navigated to the near me tab, for example,
you would get certain stuff served up to you automatically
before you would even start searching. Same with any of
the others. But he did say the near metab presented
(31:47):
him with an array of things located close by, including
an ar augmented reality style feature where you could hold
up your phone and using the rear facing camera, it
would display results in your screen for plays that were
near you, like in the direction that you were holding
your phone, so you can hold up your phone and
see that maybe down the street there's like a little
(32:08):
Mexican restaurant, and it would include stuff like the rating
for that restaurant and maybe the hours for it, just
by holding up your phone and looking at the screen
as you move your camera around, which is pretty nifty,
particularly for back in twenty eighteen, because we're still talking
about implementations that are essentially the same thing, and it's
six years later now. Now. Overall, Barrett's experiences seemed like
(32:29):
he found the taxonomy and organization of the Being search
app a little weird and haphazard. The actual search was
pretty straightforward, but the stuff that was presented on each
tab like a landing page, that's what seemed very weird
to him. I recommend reading the article to get the
full effect of what he was saying. Again, that's in wired.
(32:50):
I used only Being for three months. Here's what I
found and what I didn't. Now. Barrett said that for
the most part, being delivered search results that were at
least as good as Google's, although there was an exception.
If Barrett searched for a specific article that had been
published on Wired, he found it was really challenging to
get BING to return relevant search results, Like they just
(33:10):
weren't popping up, even if he included several words found
in the headline of the article, or he included the
site like he wrote like in Wired, or if he
included the author who wrote the original piece, and that's
just kind of odd. But otherwise, he said, his take
was quote search is search is search end quote, meaning
that it's pretty unremarkable for the most part, Like, as
(33:32):
long as you're doing it, okay, it's good enough. And
it's not like Google has the market on effective web search.
They just have the market on search in general. Now.
In twenty twenty one, Bloomberg reported that a lawyer for
Google had a bit of ironic information for the world,
and that was that the top searched term on bing
(33:55):
was in fact Google. Now, if that's true, that has
to stay. So why would the lawyer even bring this up? Well,
that was because Google was already in a stew because
regulators around the world were looking at the company's dominant
position and web search something that's still going on today,
and the argument was that Google held the equivalent of
(34:19):
a monopoly, and yeah, if you're hovering around ninety percent
of the market share, you kind of are a monopoly.
I mean, if nine out of ten web searches around
the world are happening on your platform and the other
one out of ten are divided up among all your competitors,
that's a pretty bleak picture as far as competition is concerned.
(34:40):
But Google's response was, Hey, it's not our fault. We
give the best search results. Even our largest competitor, Microsoft
bing sees that the top search query in their own
search tool is for us. How is it our fault
that we're doing it better than anybody else, or how
is it a bad thing? The verge is Mitchell Clark
(35:01):
looked into this in October twenty twenty one and found
that a third party SEO analysis firm called au Refs
AhR EFS backed up what Google's lawyer claimed that Google
was in fact the top searched term on bing, followed
by YouTube, which of course is another Google property. Then
(35:23):
Facebook and then whoopseee back to Google with Gmail. Yikes,
but that's global searches. If you restricted it to US
based searches, it would change. Actually Google fell to third place,
Facebook took the top spot, but still Google being a
top five search item on the BING search tool. That's rough. Also,
(35:46):
here's another fun fact. Bing was the seventh most searched
term on BING, which definitely sounds weird, right, like, why
would someone go to bing to search baning because you're
already there? But as Clark points out in his article,
that could come down to people using a platform that
has being set as the default search engine, but it's
(36:08):
not being itself. So let's say that you know, you're
on a desktop app or a mobile app and BING
is powering the search, but it's not, you know, branded
as BING, then maybe you would search ban in there
to go straight to the BING search page itself as
opposed to just the search bar inside the app. That
(36:29):
makes sense. In fact, that could also be how it's
happening with Google that people want to go to the
Google home page and so they're just typing in Google
in whatever platform they happen to be in, and sometimes
that's powered by bing, So I bet Google is actually
a fairly high search term in Google's own search queries
as well, right, Like, I don't think it's just that
(36:50):
people are on bing and they're like, Oh, I don't
want to be here, let's look for Google anyway. In
late twenty twenty two, Microsoft engineers began to work with
another technology that would change search and this is generative AI.
So before OpenAI began to dominate headlines in late twenty
twenty two, Microsoft already had access to the GPT for
(37:12):
Large Language Model and was probing its capabilities. Microsoft engineers
were really impressed with the performance of the Large Language Model,
and they began working on a search tool that could
tap into those capabilities and combine them with search results.
And they called it Prometheus, which is a humble name
to be sure, that's sarcasm. So Prometheus was a tool
(37:35):
that could mix generative AI responses with search results and
provide answers to a user that, if everything worked as intended,
might give all the information needed for basic queries, or
it could serve as a good start for a deeper
dive into the topic. Microsoft would ultimately develop Prometheus into
a new feature in being called Bing chat a chat
(37:58):
GPT like aiic conversationalist that could answer questions all by itself. Now,
most of the time those answers were perfectly cromulent, to
quote the Simpsons, but in other cases you would get outliers.
You get really weird stuff where the chatbot would present
incorrect or bizarre responses, sometimes like emotionally tinged responses, and
(38:21):
often this fell into the category of hallucinations or confabulations.
In other words, the stuff that where an AI model
starts to statistically select the most likely following word, but
it turns out it's the wrong word or the wrong
series of words, and that you know, just sometimes the
correct answer is an outlier statistically speaking, but AI models
(38:43):
follow the most likely statistical response, and so sometimes you
get weird stuff. Kevin Russ of The New York Times
wrote that the AI powered search propelled Being into becoming
his favorite search engine initially, but he followed that up
with another piece just a little bit later, in which
he said that further interactions with the AI powered chatbot
(39:04):
made him feel kind of unsettled, and it dethroned Being
from being his favorite search engine. To read about his
uncanny chat encounter with Bing. You need to check out
his article from February sixteenth, twenty twenty three, in the
New York Times. It's titled a conversation with Bing's chatbot
left me deeply unsettled. And yeah, he explains like this
(39:27):
interaction convinced him that AI is not really ready for
regular interactions with humanity, that those sort of things can
turn in a way that one are not necessarily helpful
and two can be outright disturbing, Which is an interesting take.
But Microsoft has famously invested heavily in artificial intelligence, so
(39:49):
I don't think we're backing out of AI powered search
anytime soon. It's one of those elements where Microsoft really
believes they can take a solid shot at Google. Google
obviously has also invested heavily in AI powered search, although
Google's attempts have received a lot of ridicule based upon
(40:10):
some bad results. I mean, you know, being told that
the best way to keep cheese on your pizza is
by mixing glue in with the cheese is not great,
not a great look. So yeah, the Google's had its
own setbacks when it comes to generative AI incorporated within search,
and I think Microsoft sees that as a real opportunity
to make a bigger dent in Google's dominance. And again,
(40:33):
when every percentage point is equivalent to a couple of
billion dollars of revenue, that's a worthy endeavor. Notably, Microsoft
is dedicated around fourteen billion dollars into open ai. That's
that's the company that created GPT and chat GPT. But
more recently the two companies appeared to be reevaluating that relationship.
There's been a lot of articles published about how Microsoft
(40:56):
is looking at diversifying its approach to artificial intelligence, that
people at the company executives that the company have started
to question whether it's wise to depend so heavily upon
a partner company for AI capabilities, and that perhaps it
might be better to spread out and look at other
opportunities for AI and not just hit your wagon to
(41:20):
open AI's horse. Meanwhile, open ai has said, hey, should
we ever get to a point where we create artificial
general intelligence, we're severing the relationship with Microsoft so that
they cannot use AGI because we're too worried that Microsoft
would use it for bad reasons and we would get
negative consequences. Also, open ai has reserved the right to
(41:43):
define what AGI is and decide when they get there,
So it essentially feels like it's a bargaining chip that
open ai is saying, hey, unless you continue to fund
us with billions of dollars each year, because AI is expensive,
and if we don't get billions of dollars, we will
spend ourselves out of business. Then we're going to take
(42:04):
our toys and you're not going to be able to
use them, and then you're really going to be behind Google. Again,
that seems to be what's going on, at least from
my perspective at the corporate level, and that's kind of
where BING is right now. Does it become this heavily
AI dependent search tool that can potentially take a big
chunk out of Google's search dominance. It raises other questions
(42:27):
as well, like if a search engine ends up giving
you the material you need without you having to go
through and click on a link, then what good is
the search engine as a search engine? Because if the
traffic is not ultimately going to the companies that host
the information provided to create those answers, then those companies
(42:48):
are ultimately going to go out of business, and then
you no longer have a source of information to pull
from to get those answers that you need in the
first place. So, in other words, the fear is that generative,
a eye powered search will ultimately cannibalize the Internet and
kill the source of info that it depends upon in
(43:09):
order to give us answers, and instead we're going to
get answers that get less and less good as time
goes on, until ultimately we arrive at ideocracy. All roads
lead to idiocracy eventually. Is the saying that I just
made all right on that cheerful note. I hope all
of you out there are doing well. If you are
(43:30):
in the United States and you have not yet voted,
the election day is tomorrow, November fifth. No matter what
flubbs someone might say, it's not January fifth, it's November fifth.
Go out there and vote. Do your research, make an
informed decision. The future of the country depends upon it.
The future of democracy depends upon it. Democracy only works
(43:52):
if people participate in it. So do your research, get
out to your polling place and vote if you haven't already.
And for those of you around the world, I wish
you the absolute best. I hope you're doing well, and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech stuff is
(44:14):
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Host
Jonathan Strickland
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