On Friday afternoon, I got to play around a bit with Bing Deep Search, Microsoft’s “enhancement” to Bing Search that provides a “deeper and richer exploration of the web.” And honestly, my quick impression was that I wasn’t too impressed, mostly because some results weren’t returned and because it took about a full minute to provide results.
Microsoft’s Mikhail Parakhin said they are still testing it.
Microsoft announced Deep Search on December 5th, 2024, and since then hasn’t provided much of an update outside of saying it might one day come to Bing Chat/Copilot when it’s faster. But since then I haven’t seen many people watching Deep Search in the wild. That’s until Friday afternoon.
On Friday afternoon, after Shameem Adhikarath saw it in the wild, I tried it out and could see it too, so I wrote my quick thoughts on Land of seekers.
We knew Bing Deep Search was very slow, but I didn’t realize how slow it really was. It took over a minute for most searches and some of the searches I tried returned a response that said “Sorry, I can’t help with that” and I should “Search something else”.
Here are some screenshots I took from my searches:
I don’t see that deep search icon anymore; I suspect they released this feature too widely on Friday afternoon and pulled it shortly after.
Here’s where it’s generating a response (really giving you query enhancements in a smarter way):
Look to the right, I searched Bing and it said these options on the right, so I selected “AI Chat”:
For [search engine optimization] didn’t give me an answer:
But for SEO companies it did:
Glenn Gabe also played with it and wrote: “I’ve been testing this with multiple queries. It’s terrible IMO. It took over a minute per query (yes over 60 seconds to get results), failed multiple times (returning a blank screen).with an error message), and when the results were returned, I didn’t really understand the difference between default results and deep search. There’s no way this could be implemented in its current form. It’s horrible. Nobody’s going to use it. Nobody.”
I have been testing this with several queries. It’s terrible IMO. It took over a minute per query (yes, over 60 seconds to get results), failed several times (returning a blank screen with an error message), and when the results came back, I didn’t really understand the difference… https://t.co/wCXmCYV8Wg
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 2, 2024
He shared more examples:
@MParakhin I have been trying Deep Search. Check out this thread. Not sure what’s going on there, but it takes over 1 minute per query and fails like 80% of the time. There’s no way this could go live. Just my 2 cents.
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 2, 2024
Super disappointed to try Deep Search. If “deep” means blank screens and error pages while I wait more than a minute to see it, I’ll skip the deep search next time. I know they’re working on improving it, but I think it’s a bit confusing for users right now (even when… https://t.co/1ztPpNasFR
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 5, 2024
Microsoft’s Mikhail Parakhin responded to these threads:
We are testing it everywhere, the plan is also to roll it out everywhere.
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) February 2, 2024
Why did some searches fail? Well, test and debug:
I have it. I think it will confuse a lot of people. How do they know it’s just for this type of query? Many will just click it and wait forever. And then the SERPs don’t look much different and it’s hard to tell what Deep Search did compared to a standard search. I would…
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 2, 2024
You can toggle between search refinements for more details:
And if you hovered over the toggle, the longer explanation of the query interpretation will be displayed.
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) February 2, 2024
I’m not sure if searchers will wait that long for a search answer…
Discussion forum a X.
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