• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 13, 2023

When Microsoft introduced Bing Search with ChatGPT built in last February, I thought the technology would eventually replace traditional search.

Mikhail Parakhin, CEO, Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft, hinted on Twitter during the weekend that this might happen.

He tweeted in response to a question that answers on Bing Search uses old technology and crowdsourcing, and that Bing Chat answers “will replace them ASAP” with Bing Chat responses. “Probably even some new UI.”

Parakhin leads Bing Search and Bing Chat. He joined Microsoft from Yandex in September 2022, where he served as CTO and director.

Parakhin also talked to Twitter users about other things this past weekend. One user, Michael P. Frank, associate in engineering at Florida State University, mentioned: "if you scroll down too far, it adds an example query to the chat, which almost certainly isn’t what the user wants to do." He asked whether this could be fixed.

“Yes, sorry, we are preparing for improved SERP-Chat synchronization, it's a tricky interaction, so the bugs keep creeping in. Fixing.” Parakhin wrote.

Brazil-based Vitor de Lucca tweeted: “I need to let go of Google, because I'm really finding Bing better.”

One major issue with Bing right now, he tweeted, is that it does not seem to allow the user to search by date and only works for a 1-year prior-year period, compared to Google, which does not have a date limit -- or DuckDuckGo, which pulls its information from Bing, and also doesn't have a date limit.

Search needs to move forward. Artificial intelligence will help it get there.

When I asked Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, senior vice president of product at The Trade Desk, his opinion on artificial intelligence and what he sees for the future of search, he said: “When it comes to Bing Chat answers and search answers, it seems like it will go in that direction in terms of having something more human and more friendly come back to you.”

Pitigoi-Aron referenced his Amazon Alexa and Google devices at home, and would “love” to have them respond with more understanding and context.

“I don’t want to fumble with the exact sentence I need to ask just to learn who won the Oscars,” he said.