Today, I decided to check the hype about the Bing search engine that got superpowers all of a sudden, by integrating with chatGPT. I mainly got the buzz from many Twitter accounts I follow, but a post by Scott Hanselman sold it for me. It appears that Bing “understands” your query using chatGPT’s language analysis power, then searches the web to fulfill the query looking for current data (something chatGPT is not able to do currently), feeds it back to chatGPT for analysis and/or summarizing, and then returns a much more human-like response than what we are used to getting when using Google or other present search engines.

I haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing the new Bing Chat feature first hand, as there is a waitlist for users to access the feature. This is where another interesting part of how Microsoft is leveraging their involvement in chatGPT comes into play. In order to join the waitlist for the Chat feature of Bing, you have to have a Microsoft Live account. That makes sense up to a point, since it is an easy way to provide specific users with access to that feature, which is not publicly available yet. The genius part is that when you join the waitlist, you get a pop-up that you can skip to the front of the line if you install Bing as your default search engine on your PC or Mac and also download the Bing app on your phone.

Even before the public availability of the feature and before we can fully evaluate its capabilities, Microsoft has successfully increased Bing’s presence on a larger number of devices than they could have imagined. This is a testament to their marketing savvy. In my opinion, it is pure marketing genius.