When you visit the Google’s chatbot bard’s website in Microsoft Bing. A New Button pops up besides the search bar which lets you compare bard results with Bing chat’s. I have no idea why they implemented this, well maybe to show off the their chatbot is better than bard or something?
To be fair that could be a lot worse. I was expecting injected webpage content. I think this is acceptable and serves as a quick way to compare multiple sources. I dislike that it’s Microsoft more than I do the actual “feature”.
It’s not very far away from injecting it into a webpage though. I feel like at this point it wouldn’t make any difference. Except on a meta level.
Just wait until they open a little popup or sidebar with bing search results every time you search on Google, DuckDuckGo or whatever competitor.
Is it me, or is that pretty anti consumer?
Everything from Microsoft or Google is anti everyone.
Being offered a second option and not having a monopoly is as consumer friendly as it gets, may I suggest a dictionary?
Except they are using the power they have with people using their browser to divert people away from the alternative to their product.
Using your own product to advertise others? How dare they. Are you also angry theyre using windows to advertise onedrive? Lmao
at that point i consider it a microsoft tradition to do the “hey, i see you’re using Y, we have a similar product called Z and it’s better, do you want to try it?”-routine no one asked for.
“No one asked for this” should be Microsoft’s tag line. Rather than fix problems that have been around for years - decades in some cases - they just keep adding crap that no one wants or asked for.
It’s also shameless and pathetic.
No more anti-consumer than Google saying that “the internet is best experienced in chrome” every time you open YouTube or Google search.
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Well, they also mangle/limit the Google Search on Firefox for Android. If you change your useragent to Chrome, it will show just fine, so it’s not issue with Firefox, it’s deliberate.
Yeah, I forget about that until I get a new phone and have to reinstall that extension…
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Just gives you a limited interface. The menu on left side is completely gone, voice search is missing, Google Lens is missing, you can’t search by tags.
This add-on fixes it by changing useragent to Chrome when browsing Google: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search-fixer/ which makes Firefox contribute to Chrome marketshare.
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Weird to think now that Google used to have Customized Firefox search page.
DDG has better results anyway
Google’s results these days are shit. The other day I googled an exact terraform resource and included “terraform” in my search query. The first result should’ve been the page for that resource in terraform’s documentation, but that page wasn’t in the results at all. What was there was a blogspam copy of said page.
Google has stop paying attention to it’s own search commands. I can +search term in my search and it will still bring up the same results it brought up in the previous search that made me include the + in the first place, even when I know results with that term exist.
Also if it decides you’ve typo’d, it often no longer gives you the option to search for the exact thing you typed. It used to say “did you mean __________?” and you could click a link to search for the exact word it thins you mistyped. It now often doesn’t give you that option anymore.
Doesn’t DDG just use Bing?
No, they operate their own crawlers.
Per https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/:
We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
Don’t you think it’s different if Google says this on their own sites vs Microsoft showing this when visiting their competitors?
Both isn‘t good. But I feel like one of those is clearly worse.
Microsoft needs another good antitrust lawsuit. They’re so aggressive about pushing their products.
I haven’t heard many other people complain about it so it was probably a very short term thing, but I’ll never forget when they updated windows defender to identify the chrome installer as highest-threat malware so that its download would be blocked, and if you forced the download windows would instantly delete the installer for your own protection.
So does Google imo.
Honestly the way Microsoft handles things rubs me worse than Google. It’s specifically the way that Microsoft watches what you do, and then tries to stop and convince you to use their stuff instead. And they don’t respect you saying no once, instead trying to stop you at every step in the process.
Google does the same.
I don’t use Chrome. Every single time I go to any Google service, it tells me I need to be using Chrome. It doesn’t take “no” for an answer; it’s a constant nag.
Google Docs especially gets mad and doesn’t even let you paste without formatting.
Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta. Pretty much all the big tech companies really need a visit from the FTC.
How is Meta acting anti competitive? I am not defending them, just actually curious. For Microsoft, Alphabet and Apple it makes sense because they control the platforms.
Why not Apple, the closest company to having a monopoly on software running on smart phones in the USA.
Apple and Google have both done similar things. Osx will ask you to use safari if you install a different browser. Google shows “it’s better in chrome!” on basically all of their properties if you’re using non chromium based browsers. No one seems to really give a shit.
Honestly the FTC should be handing out antitrust suits like candy. Late stage capitalism has created a bit of a target rich environment, if only the FTC could take advantage.
Courts have been blocking them consistently. They’ve been a touch more aggressive, but Congress needs to pass more aggressive laws. Many of these companies are vertically integrated, not horizontally - and the laws aren’t really equipped to deal with that.
I’d like to recommend this video by a retired Microsoft OS engineer about how LLMs like ChatGPT and Bard work. It has lots of technical mumbo jumbo, but Dave tries to explain it in simpler terms.
“…but as the company grew and became more…”
Evil
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Hasn’t this been there for months? I remember seeing this a while ago.
Classic Microsoft. Playing dirty because why not?
Ngl though I do really like this.
PLEASE USE OUR PRODUCTS WE BEG YOU
Does Bard work with VPNs? Microsoft has completely blocked access.
Bing works with vpn. At least if you are logged in
Welp. I can’t remember my MS account credentials ever since W10 nuked itself and my entire C: partition, which caused me to switch to Linux. And at this point I really cannot be arsed to go through recovery or create a new one, especially when they just give you a “network error” without any further explanation.
I like this way better than Microsoft just showing popups trying you to stick to their browser.
It’s like a dick measuring contest; personally, I don’t want AI shoved down my throat and my private data sold without my consent.
While bard got some really bad reviews compared to chatgpt, I’ve honestly found it better with queries chatgpt struggled with. I have two examples:
- “Please write a python function that returns an exact solution to pi” Both come up with gregory-leibnitz formula, which of course is an approximation. When challenged that I want an exact solution instead of an approximation, chatgpt apologizes and then returns yet another approximation. Bard correctly claims that that is impossible as pi is an irrational number.
- “What can you tell me about a compound called polysac-active in cough syrups”. Chatgpt hallucinates something about a company in Indonesia, which seems to have a product that sounds vaguely similar to one of the brands selling that compound. Bard, on the other hand, correctly surmises it’s mostly honey and even gives some examples of real products that feature this ingredient.
In general, Bard in general seems one of the few llms that will tell me it doesn’t know something or that something is impossible. IMHO that’s better than just coming up with a hallucination.
I had kinda the opposite experience using Bard. It made up random technical details for the questions I asked. It assured me that it knew the contents of a document that it didn’t have access to and generated what it claimed was information from that document rather than saying it couldn’t read it and didn’t know.
Same. Found it to be better with some and worse work others. With some of those where it provides worse results compared to ChatGPT it just feels like it’s missing the fine tuning. It provides pretty similar results as when ChatGPT 3.5 came out a while ago. People just tend to forget about it.
I liked Edge whilst it was in beta. It was just another browser. Now it’s a browser caked with Microsoft services so they do their best to try to get you to use it. Even Outlook now opens links in Edge, yes ignoring your default browser settings, unless you go into Outlook and unconfigure it. Fuck off Microsoft.
That outlook setting is such a load of crap. Your two choices are “Microsoft Edge” or “Default Browser”. Why even have that setting at all? Just use the default browser!
I hate big tech. I hate big tech.
