Try the new Bing—the chat-style search engine assistant

28/02/2023 /

Yesterday, my application for the new Bing experience was approved, and I went to experience it immediately. This article records my initial impression of the new Bing.

How to experience the new Bing

Visit Bing International ( bing.com
) and download the Bing App (non-Chinese version), and apply to join the waitlist. I applied on the first day of the launch of the waitlist, and it was not officially approved until yesterday.

The new Bing recommends (mandatory) that you use Microsoft Edge browser and use bing.com to search. If you use Chrome, Safari, Firefox or other browsers to visit in mainland China, no matter what webpage you search, it will not return you any As a result, you will see a blank screen, which is very frustrating.

Access the new Bing with Chrome

If you are in mainland China and are accustomed to using the Chrome browser, and do not want to install an Edge browser to experience the new Bing, you can use the following method to use the new Bing in Chrome:

First install ModHeader in the Chrome Store
, so that we can modify the Header in the HTTP request to imitate the Edge browser.

Then configure ModeHeader and add rules as follows:

Add at Request headers:

  • Emulated Edge browser: user-agent = Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/110.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/110.0.1587.41
  • Simulate Hong Kong IP: X-Forwarded-For = 1.36.xy

Select “(Request) URL filter” at FILTER and fill in .*://www.bing.com/.*

Visit bing.com now and you will see the [Chat] option at the top, and you can use the new Bing smoothly.

New Bing First Experience

Before the launch of the new Bing, I have used ChatGPT for several months, so the following mainly compares the chat of the new Bing with ChatGPT. Through the different answers given by the two to the same question, the small sees the big.

Question: Where does the Liangma River in Beijing originate?

ChatGPT and the new Bing gave very different answers, as shown in Figure 1. We have no way of knowing where ChatGPT’s answers come from. If you don’t know anything about the ground in Beijing, you may think that its answers are quite reasonable, but in fact, people who know a little bit will think that it is [serious nonsense]. The new Bing’s answer clarifies the source, which comes from channels such as Wikipedia and Baidu Encyclopedia.

image

Figure 1: Different answers given by ChatGPT and the new Bing

From the above answers and my one-day use experience:

  1. ChatGPT does not directly quote content on the Internet, because the same answer cannot be found on the Internet, so we cannot directly verify the accuracy of the answer, and need to have further dialogue with it to correct its mistakes;
  2. The new Bing is a question for Q&A, and many answers refer to Zhihu;
  3. Each answer in the new Bing will give a reference source, which is convenient for us to verify. This is like an auxiliary tool for search engines. If you search directly, you can easily find the answer;
  4. New Bing will recommend some related questions according to your question, similar to the recommendation function in search engines;
  5. Because the new Bing is connected to the Internet, if you ask some recent questions, you can also find the answer, while ChatGPT only has data before 2021;
  6. The new Bing chat function is more stable, and I did not encounter the need to refresh and reconnect during my one-day trial period, while ChatGPT free users often encounter refresh problems;
  7. The context association ability of the new Bing is relatively poor, and it is more like a chat-style search tool, which can summarize and output some searched webpage topics, and then give the reference address;

Verdict: Chat is the new Bing’s search engine aid, and if Google did something like Bart, I’d probably keep using Google Search.

Views of netizens

I shared this picture in Moments yesterday to see what everyone thinks about these two answers. I have received many friends from netizens, and I selected the following for you to taste:

  1. ChatGPT has his own personality, he is like a middle-aged greasy man, serious nonsense, really powerful. Much stronger than those honestly answered AI;
  2. ChatGPT is a math idiot, as long as the semantics are self-consistent and logical, it can make serious nonsense out of nothing. And the data is outdated and only the data before 2021;
  3. ChatGPT is currently not suitable for answering objective questions. To put it bluntly, its core is “generation/fabrication”, but it is very suitable for some creations based on existing facts, such as polishing/translating articles. The new Bing is more like traditional NLP + Search engine, in fact, I think it is more reliable for the search scene;
  4. The new Bing is better, ChatGPT is offline and sometimes fudges the answers. New must apply ReAct prompt will automatically search + reason;
  5. ChatGPT is a tool for divergent thinking, and then implement and work specifically, and cross-validate it based on relevant keywords. However, the new Bing cannot write out a function in detail and reasonably, and the content is also limited. Still use ChatGPT for auxiliary work.

What do you think about ChatGPT and the new Bing, please reply in the comment area.

refer to

This article is transferred from https://jimmysong.io/blog/new-bing-chat/
This site is only for collection, and the copyright belongs to the original author.