I must confess to having a bit of a soft spot for Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Not because it’s good (it isn’t) and not because there are no alternatives (there are). It’s all down to how hard it tries to be relevant or remind you about other products from Redmond. To coin a phrase from a great game, it keeps on keeping on. And now it’s trying its best to do the same thing for Copilot, Microsoft’s seemingly everywhere AI.
Word of this was reported by Windows Latest, and having just reinstalled Windows on my main PC without touching Edge, I fired it up and typed in a Bing search for ChatGPT (after wading through countless setup windows, of course). And yep, there it is: a reminder that “Your Copilot is here” and with it, you can “Effortlessly ask questions, generate images, and handle tasks.”
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I tried searching for Claude and Gemini and got the same Copilot-first result. However, doing the same for GPT-4, DALL-E, and Llama gave me the direct links to the first two and the Wikipedia page for an ungainly-looking, spit-toting mammal for the last one. Perhaps Bing doesn’t rate those as being competition for Copilot?
While I’m sure that this all comes across as me having a bit of dislike for Copilot, I’m actually completely ambivalent about it. I have no issue with it pervading throughout Windows and its applications, and other Microsoft products, because I can easily ignore or disable it. If I want to use it, then the option is always there, at least.
However, I’m a bit puzzled as to why Microsoft added a Copilot prompt bar when you’ve Bing-searched for a specific term. If the software giant is so keen on us all using it, why not just always have it there? It would certainly be very easy to do.
I installed a few other browsers and set the default search engines to Bing in those, and the Copilot plug still pops up, so it’s clearly integrated into Bing webpages rather than being proprietary to Edge.
I’m also puzzled as to why Microsoft hasn’t done a Google and made Copilot AI stuff the default search response from Bing. Let me just clarify that I don’t want it to do this because Google’s AI summaries are often awful, but from a marketing perspective, you couldn’t ask for a better way to showcase all your AI efforts in front of millions of users every day.
Bing’s half-hearted attempt at promoting Copilot seems contrary to Microsoft’s otherwise invasive integration. I’d expect to see Copilot being promoted or the prompt bar displayed on every Bing search result, not just a handful related to certain AI models. Heck, even Copilot itself offers a better summary of how to do it all properly.
Look, I’m just a poor hardware writer, not a multi-billion-dollar software company, and I clearly know nothing, but perhaps Microsoft might want to use its own tools to figure out how to market them better?
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