Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are you So. On May twenty eight, two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine, Microsoft's CEO, who at that time was Steve
Speaker 1: Developers Developers Developers Ballmer, appeared at the All Things Digital
Speaker 1: conference to announce the company's new search engine BING. Previously,
Speaker 1: Microsoft's search tool was called Live Search, but like just
Speaker 1: about any company not named Google, Microsoft was kind of
Speaker 1: fighting for scraps now. At that time, Google boasted a
Speaker 1: sixty four point two percent market share for search. Yahoo
Speaker 1: took second place with twenty point four percent. Live Search
Speaker 1: was quietly in the corner with just eight point two
Speaker 1: percent of the market share. Now that's according to CNN's
Speaker 1: David Goldman, who wrote about bing's announcement back in two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine. To be fair, Google had a heck
Speaker 1: of a head start on Microsoft in the search department.
Speaker 1: Google Search initially launched in September nineteen ninety eight, and
Speaker 1: Microsoft didn't introduce the beta for Live Search until March
Speaker 1: of two thousand and six. Though the company had toyed
Speaker 1: with search earlier after acquiring the live dot com site
Speaker 1: in two thousand and five, and had in fact introduced
Speaker 1: ms in search in nineteen ninety nine, but that one
Speaker 1: was powered by a third party search provider. It wasn't
Speaker 1: Microsoft actually powering the search tools. Well. Google rose quickly
Speaker 1: in the ranks of search engines, largely because Google's page
Speaker 1: erank system seemed to have an almost supernatural knack for
Speaker 1: returning the best search results at the top of the list.
Speaker 1: Google was quick to adjust its approach to mitigate web
Speaker 1: designers who used every trick in the book to try
Speaker 1: and fool search engines into listing their sites. For example,
Speaker 1: in ye olden days, a common ruse was to dump
Speaker 1: a dictionary's worth of search terms onto a web page,
Speaker 1: and usually you would do it in very very tiny
Speaker 1: text at the bottom of the page. Sometimes you would
Speaker 1: just change the text color to match the background of
Speaker 1: the web page so that people couldn't even see that
Speaker 1: there was text down there, and it would just be
Speaker 1: a pit of seemingly random words. But the goal was
Speaker 1: to get a hit on search engines that were crawling
Speaker 1: the web, that were just looking for pages that contain
Speaker 1: certain search query terms, and sure visitors to that page
Speaker 1: were almost certain to get frustrated when they saw that
Speaker 1: the thing they were looking for wasn't there. But that
Speaker 1: didn't really matter. What mattered was getting that page view
Speaker 1: count up so that you could sell ads on the page,
Speaker 1: because capitalism. Anyway. Google had been growing its influence in
Speaker 1: the search market for years by the time Microsoft launched
Speaker 1: Live Search in two thousand and six, and this wasn't
Speaker 1: just a case of Microsoft wanting to take a step
Speaker 1: from Google's milkshake. In fact, it was more like the opposite,
Speaker 1: because since two thousand and three, at least according to
Speaker 1: Fortune magazine, Bill Gates, the co founder and former CEO
Speaker 1: of Microsoft, was starting to get a real bad feeling
Speaker 1: about Google. He noticed that Google had been advertising job
Speaker 1: positions that sounded a lot more like a company that
Speaker 1: was looking to get into OS design operating system design
Speaker 1: rather than just you know, staying in their lane and
Speaker 1: focusing on search. Gates sniffed out a potential competitor, and
Speaker 1: it was a competitor that was building up momentum, and
Speaker 1: that was something he didn't like very much. Now you
Speaker 1: might think that what I'm in applying is that Bill
Speaker 1: Gates doesn't like competition. Let me be clear, I believe
Speaker 1: Bill Gates loves competition because he loves the feeling of
Speaker 1: squashing competition out of existence, either through acquiring the competitor or,
Speaker 1: if possible, making some deals that absolutely destroy the competitor. Now,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm off base. Maybe my perception of Bill Gates
Speaker 1: and his approach to business is not at all accurate,
Speaker 1: but it sure does feel right to me. But back
Speaker 1: to web search. So Steven Sinofsky, who was head of
Speaker 1: Windows as well as the Office suite of Productivity Software,
Speaker 1: wrote a book last year. It was published. It was
Speaker 1: titled Hardcore Software Inside the Rise and Fall of the
Speaker 1: PC Revolution, And in that book, among lots and lots
Speaker 1: of other stories, he talks about the early days of
Speaker 1: Microsoft getting into web search. Sinofsky would be included in
Speaker 1: the web search team after it had already formed and
Speaker 1: had built to prototype version of the search tool. Christopher Pain,
Speaker 1: who would become VP of Windows Live Search, pitched the
Speaker 1: idea of a Microsoft search tool way back in February
Speaker 1: two thousand and three. He didn't beat around the bush either.
Speaker 1: He told his bosses that in order to build a
Speaker 1: good search tool, one that could go toe to toe
Speaker 1: with Google. It was going to take a huge investment,
Speaker 1: like one hundred and fifty million bucks and a year
Speaker 1: and a half of work at least, and that didn't
Speaker 1: include the creation and maintenance of server farms that would
Speaker 1: actually handle all the search traffic. But his pitch got
Speaker 1: the thumbs up from his higher ups, and Project Underdog
Speaker 1: was a go. So Christopher Pain then said upon the
Speaker 1: launch of Live Search, quote, combined with the rich browsing
Speaker 1: and integrated searching services delivered by Windows Live Toolbar and
Speaker 1: Live dot com, the new search service offers customers the
Speaker 1: next generation of unified services today, which doesn't mean much
Speaker 1: on the surface, right, But some of those services that
Speaker 1: Live Search would offer included the ability to preview search results,
Speaker 1: to do image searches, and to create search macros to
Speaker 1: customize the experience to the user. So if you had
Speaker 1: a very particular way you wanted to go about searches,
Speaker 1: you could create a macro for that and not have
Speaker 1: to recreate it every single time you needed to use search.
Speaker 1: But there was no question that Google was running away
Speaker 1: with search, even as Microsoft argued that Live Search was
Speaker 1: a more versatile tool than Google was. The hope was
Speaker 1: that this new search engine, that Bing, which would replace
Speaker 1: Live Search, would rise to the challenge and wrestle away
Speaker 1: a good chunk of that dominant market position from Google.
Speaker 1: Spoiler alert, that would not happen. So, according to stat counter,
Speaker 1: Google currently enjoys an even more dominant position than it
Speaker 1: did before. Right when Live Search debuted, Google held you know,
Speaker 1: sixty four percent of the global market. Well, stat counter
Speaker 1: says that Google today has around ninety percent of the
Speaker 1: market share for web search and Bing has less than
Speaker 1: five percent. Now, I should add that's from an analysis
Speaker 1: of the market from just one company, and in previous
Speaker 1: reporting in twenty twenty four, stat Counter indicated that Google
Speaker 1: had actually taken a pretty massive hit in market share,
Speaker 1: dropping as low as eighty six point five to eight percent. Now,
Speaker 1: in an earlier report, that drop was even more drastic.
Speaker 1: Stat Counter analyzed and said that it was down to
Speaker 1: seventy seven point five to two percent. However, they later
Speaker 1: revised that saying that that was an error. But even
Speaker 1: at the lowest point, even with the error, like, let's
Speaker 1: say that seventy seven point five two percent was actually accurate,
Speaker 1: that's still higher than the market share Google enjoyed back
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine when Microsoft first announced BING.
Speaker 1: So even if you say, yeah, Google took a big hit,
Speaker 1: it's still higher market share than it had when Microsoft
Speaker 1: was trying to take a swing at the king. Now.
Speaker 1: Some thought that when Microsoft announced BING that it was
Speaker 1: really just a rebranding of Live Search, that all Microsoft
Speaker 1: had really done was collect the various features of Live
Speaker 1: Search under a more unified approach and then rebranded it BING.
Speaker 1: And from what I can tell, that's a fairly accurate
Speaker 1: take on what had happened. Not that Microsoft didn't introduce
Speaker 1: new features, but ultimately this was really an attempt to
Speaker 1: have BING be memorable and to stand out because Live
Speaker 1: Search just wasn't ringing in the ears of the web
Speaker 1: denizens out there, and hopefully BING would be able to
Speaker 1: attract curious users who would use it and then find
Speaker 1: they preferred Microsoft's approach to Google's. According to a blog
Speaker 1: post by trung fon Bing beat out the name Bang
Speaker 1: as the actual name for the search tool, that Microsoft
Speaker 1: had been debating between Bang and Bang, and that they
Speaker 1: chose Bing because well, you know, we use Google as
Speaker 1: a verb, right, Like I googled that for you? For example,
Speaker 1: if people were to use bang as a verb that, well,
Speaker 1: it's best we just leave that one alone. Plus Fn says,
Speaker 1: some folks would argue that BING is actually an acronym.
Speaker 1: I think this is playful. It's not really an acronym,
Speaker 1: but folks enjoy saying it is that being stands for,
Speaker 1: but it's not Google. Satya Nadella, who would later go
Speaker 1: on to become CEO of the whole Ding dang dern
Speaker 1: Company of Microsoft, was put in charge of the development
Speaker 1: and launch of BING. He would then go on to
Speaker 1: oversee cloud services before becoming ce of the overall company. Now,
Speaker 1: in case you're curious, Statista has a different picture of
Speaker 1: global web search market share in that as of January
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, it estimates Google holding nearly eighty two
Speaker 1: percent of the market and being at a fairly nice
Speaker 1: ten point five to one percent, so like double what
Speaker 1: stat Counter had suggested. So, according to Statista, Microsoft has
Speaker 1: actually made some gains in its overall market share by
Speaker 1: switching from live Search to Bang as if you remember,
Speaker 1: Live Search was hovering at around eight percent. However, since
Speaker 1: Google also saw gains in that time, you could really
Speaker 1: make the argument that Microsoft's bump did not come at
Speaker 1: the cost of Google. Instead, Microsoft's bump came from Yahoo's decline. Anyway,
Speaker 1: back to the announcement. At All Things Digital, Steve Baumer
Speaker 1: took the stage and he claimed that quote BING enable
Speaker 1: people to find information quickly and use the information they
Speaker 1: found to accomp tasks and make smart decisions. End quote.
Speaker 1: That is a direct quote. So that's why there's some
Speaker 1: mangled syntax in there. I didn't misspeak, that's just what
Speaker 1: Baumer said. But what he was saying is that BING
Speaker 1: wasn't a search engine, not at all. It's not a
Speaker 1: search engine. It was a decision engine. So what does
Speaker 1: that mean, Well, I would argue it doesn't really mean
Speaker 1: much of anything. Bing operates as a search engine, but
Speaker 1: the implication here is that BING would return more relevant
Speaker 1: results to queries and less junk and ads, so that
Speaker 1: you would actually get the information you needed in order to,
Speaker 1: you know, do something else to make a decision. He said,
Speaker 1: this is what is relevant when you are searching for
Speaker 1: something like People don't search just to search like they're
Speaker 1: unless you're just really bored. You're not going onto a
Speaker 1: search engine to search random topics. Typically you're searching for
Speaker 1: a reason, and it's often so that you can make
Speaker 1: a decision about out something. So that's I think what
Speaker 1: he meant by a decision engine. This was the tool
Speaker 1: you would use to get the information you needed in
Speaker 1: order to make that decision. Now, that decision might be
Speaker 1: related to, you know, searching for a restaurant or planning
Speaker 1: a vacation, or doing a job search or something like that.
Speaker 1: And the slogan that they used was bing and Decide.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of jokes about being about the
Speaker 1: name being, which typically happens in the tech sphere whenever
Speaker 1: there's a new tech service or product introduced, Invariably there
Speaker 1: are a lot of jokes made about whatever people decided
Speaker 1: to name that thing. I'm thinking of, stuff like the iPad. Obviously,
Speaker 1: Microsoft's own Zoon MP three player had a feature called
Speaker 1: Squirt where you could share a music track with another
Speaker 1: Zoom user, and I can't tell you how many jokes
Speaker 1: were made about that. So yeah, there were a lot
Speaker 1: of jokes being made quickly following this announcement. Now, initially
Speaker 1: Bing's search offered four different flavors. If you will, you
Speaker 1: could search in health, local businesses, travel, and purchases. So
Speaker 1: at the get Go. It had a much more focused
Speaker 1: approach to search, and the plan was always to expand
Speaker 1: on this and not relegate BEING to some sort of
Speaker 1: niche search engine that you'd only use for things like,
Speaker 1: you know, shopping online or something, or needing to find
Speaker 1: a doctor in your area. They wanted it to be
Speaker 1: useful in all different realms, but they had specific subcategories
Speaker 1: of search that would, in theory at least, really focus
Speaker 1: the results on whatever it is you were looking for.
Speaker 1: As Goldman pointed out in that CNN piece I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: the tool was quote set up to organize search results
Speaker 1: in relevant groups rather than as a series of links.
Speaker 1: For instance, a search for flight to New York may
Speaker 1: yield New York destinations like hotels, restaurants, and museums as
Speaker 1: almost a guidebook page end quote. Presumably this was a
Speaker 1: decision made not just to provide more utility to the
Speaker 1: end user, but also to differentiate Being from Google. And
Speaker 1: that's the beginning. We'll talk more about Microsoft and Being
Speaker 1: in just a moment, but first let's take a quick
Speaker 1: break to think our sponsors. We're back. Bing would present
Speaker 1: the user with a pain called the explore pain. That's
Speaker 1: pa in e and this pain would include a history
Speaker 1: of searches and tools to navigate to specific results relating
Speaker 1: to the query, and suggestions for related searches. It's obviously
Speaker 1: changed over the years, but I used being to do
Speaker 1: a search while I was researching this episode. I did
Speaker 1: a search on the history of Being itself, and the
Speaker 1: little panel on the left gave me tools to navigate
Speaker 1: a Wikipedia article quickly so I could zip over to
Speaker 1: relevant sections like history or features. Now I don't typically
Speaker 1: use Wikipedia in my research, at least not as a
Speaker 1: primary resource. I'll use it to find other resources on occasion,
Speaker 1: or to look for more information that flesh's stuff out,
Speaker 1: but only then if that material has proper citation so
Speaker 1: I can find the actual resources that provide that information.
Speaker 1: Because old habits die hard. I'm not saying that Wikipedia
Speaker 1: is a bad resource or that's misleading, but rather I
Speaker 1: was trained to never use Wikipedia as a main source,
Speaker 1: and that training has a firm hole of my behaviors
Speaker 1: to this day. So I will read a Wikipedia article
Speaker 1: and then follow the resources to read the stuff that
Speaker 1: was used to generate those perspectives that are reflected in
Speaker 1: the article. But yeah, I still don't use Wikipedia as
Speaker 1: a main resource to this day. Anyway, Microsoft made some
Speaker 1: big moves with BING. In July two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: after launching, the company reached a partnership agreement with Yahoo,
Speaker 1: and BING would be used to power searches on Yahoo,
Speaker 1: which was, of course a iconic web portal site. For
Speaker 1: the longest time, Yahoo was one of the big names
Speaker 1: in search before Google kind of eclipsed it, and this
Speaker 1: is not that different from how Google negotiates to be
Speaker 1: the default search engine on other platforms, such as the
Speaker 1: default search on say, Apple devices. The original deal had
Speaker 1: Yahoo agreed to carry BING ads on desktop searches, though
Speaker 1: later the companies would renegotiate that so that fifty one
Speaker 1: percent of ads would come from BING and the other
Speaker 1: forty nine percent could come from Yahoo's Gemini platform or
Speaker 1: any other third party company like Google. For example. In
Speaker 1: twenty ten, Microsoft made a deal with Facebook so that
Speaker 1: visitors on Facebook would get BING search results while searching
Speaker 1: within the social network. So if you use the search
Speaker 1: tool in face Book, you got BEING results. Similarly, Microsoft
Speaker 1: would make a deal with Amazon so that Alexa, the
Speaker 1: digital personal assistant, would actually draw from Being search results,
Speaker 1: and in that way Microsoft was taking a page out
Speaker 1: of Google's playbook, though on a much smaller scale. Still,
Speaker 1: every percentage point of market share counts, and by counts,
Speaker 1: I mean counts in the form of a couple of
Speaker 1: billion dollars in revenue potentially per percentage. Those are huge stakes.
Speaker 1: So when I talk about Google having a dominant position
Speaker 1: and being being relegated to you know at most around
Speaker 1: ten percent of the market share, that ten percent still
Speaker 1: represents billions of dollars in revenue. This is a big deal.
Speaker 1: So even if Microsoft's not dominating that space, it is
Speaker 1: a significant contribution to revenue. So you know, no small
Speaker 1: shakes there. In twenty twelve, a few different things happened.
Speaker 1: For one thing, Microsoft introduced bing ads. Microsoft also introduced
Speaker 1: a refresh in its layout and created what it called
Speaker 1: a three column design which is kind of self explanatory,
Speaker 1: as well as a search plus social feature or the
Speaker 1: social sidebar. Microsoft explained in a blog post that quote
Speaker 1: ninety percent of people consult with a friend or expert
Speaker 1: before making a decision, whether it's something as simple as
Speaker 1: which train will take you uptown or who is the
Speaker 1: best dentist in Boulder. Often people are the most trusted
Speaker 1: source of information end quote. Now, I don't think that
Speaker 1: comes as a shock to anyone. I think anyone kind
Speaker 1: of can have a grasp that the opinions of people,
Speaker 1: particularly people you know, hold more weight than anonymous information
Speaker 1: posted on a website or a search results page. Online
Speaker 1: retailers have been leaning on user reviews for decades as
Speaker 1: a way to move merchandise. People trust the reviews of
Speaker 1: other customers, unless, of course, those reviews end up not
Speaker 1: reflecting actual customer experiences but are instead paid reviews. That
Speaker 1: becomes a whole issue. But if the information is coming
Speaker 1: from a person rather than a company or a soulless
Speaker 1: search engine results page, it tends to carry more weight.
Speaker 1: So it made sense to incorporate these social elements. So
Speaker 1: the new design of Being in twenty twelve would feature
Speaker 1: three columns. The leftmost column, the widest one, contained the
Speaker 1: core search results for whatever the query was. Then in
Speaker 1: the center column, which was a little bit more narrow,
Speaker 1: you had the snapshot column. This one would contain relevant
Speaker 1: information related to the query. So, for example, let's say
Speaker 1: you were searching for information about a potential vacation destination.
Speaker 1: Let's say you're on bing and you're doing a search
Speaker 1: about Disney World. So the leftmost column you would have
Speaker 1: links to things like probably the main Disney World web page,
Speaker 1: but the central column could include information to stuff like
Speaker 1: flights or details about hotels in the area, or even
Speaker 1: restaurants in the area where you can make a reservation.
Speaker 1: That kind of thing. Now, the third column, the social sidebar,
Speaker 1: contained information pulled from your friends as well as other
Speaker 1: enthusiasts or experts that had content that relates to the
Speaker 1: search query. So maybe you would search for disney World
Speaker 1: and in that social sidebar you would see posts from
Speaker 1: your friends, posts from Facebook, for example, of friends who
Speaker 1: had gone to Disney World and stayed at a particular hotel.
Speaker 1: Let's say they stayed at Disney World's Caribbean Beach Resort,
Speaker 1: and you can see what they thought of the place.
Speaker 1: You would never have to rely solely on marketing from
Speaker 1: Disney itself, right, You could see what actual human beings
Speaker 1: felt about the location, and you could use that to
Speaker 1: help make your decision. And being could even help you
Speaker 1: with this. They could identify folks in your friends circle,
Speaker 1: such as on Facebook, who might know more about whatever
Speaker 1: it is you were searching for. So if you didn't
Speaker 1: find the information you needed or you wanted to have
Speaker 1: the opinion of someone you trusted. It could say, Hey,
Speaker 1: your friend Bob goes to Disney World all the time.
Speaker 1: Ask Bob, Bob's going to give you the straight information
Speaker 1: about the Caribbean Beach Resort. Microsoft called its approach always present,
Speaker 1: never intrusive, which is important, right, like to be able
Speaker 1: to say, Hey, you can leverage your friend group to
Speaker 1: get more information about this. We'll even help identify who
Speaker 1: those people are. That can come across as pretty creepy. Right.
Speaker 1: It seems to suggest that Microsoft knows all about the
Speaker 1: interests and experiences of your friends group, and that can
Speaker 1: feel pretty intrusive. And Microsoft was trying to get ahead
Speaker 1: of that saying oh, no, no, no, no, we're present,
Speaker 1: but we're not trying to intrude upon everything. We're just
Speaker 1: there as a resource to help you get more information
Speaker 1: so you can make your decisions. That's a tricky path
Speaker 1: to walk. It is hard to say, yeah, we're going
Speaker 1: to point you in the right direction by having you
Speaker 1: connect with people you actually know. Oh, but don't worry
Speaker 1: about how we know that this is the right person
Speaker 1: to talk about this thing. It's tough. Also, Microsoft updated
Speaker 1: its slogan for its search engine, so earlier on it
Speaker 1: was bing and decide, but in twenty twelve, Microsoft changed
Speaker 1: it to bing is for hashtag doing. Microsoft maintained that
Speaker 1: more often than not, people weren't just searching for something.
Speaker 1: They weren't, you know, using search as the first step
Speaker 1: to go down a rabbit hole of information. Typically, instead,
Speaker 1: they were using it as the beginning of actually doing
Speaker 1: something to take some form of action, as opposed to
Speaker 1: just reading about stuff in a somewhat random fashion. If
Speaker 1: you're searching for something, it's probably because you have a
Speaker 1: plan to do something, whether that's by you know, pet
Speaker 1: food or book travel plans, or find a new job,
Speaker 1: whatever it may be. It wasn't just I'm just curious
Speaker 1: what kind of jobs does Facebook have right now. Over
Speaker 1: the following years, Microsoft continued to invest in being Yahoo
Speaker 1: would go into further decline and Bing would at least
Speaker 1: take up some of that slack. Google would continue to
Speaker 1: dominate the search market, but some folks were looking around
Speaker 1: for an alternative to Google because, well, for a lot
Speaker 1: of reasons, but some folks were looking for it because
Speaker 1: Google's incorporation of paid search results was really irritating them. Now,
Speaker 1: these are the ads that look like normal search results.
Speaker 1: They are designated as ads. It's not like Google is
Speaker 1: trying to completely pull the wool over your eyes, but
Speaker 1: they typically are at the very top, right where you
Speaker 1: would expect the best results to be. That's where the
Speaker 1: advertised results are, and for a lot of people, it
Speaker 1: can feel almost deceptive to see that the first answers
Speaker 1: to whatever your question happened to be are all coming
Speaker 1: from sources that paid to be at the top of
Speaker 1: the heap, and you might even suspect that none of
Speaker 1: those results will contain the best answer for your question,
Speaker 1: or even worse that if you were to follow those results,
Speaker 1: you would just kind of land on a page that
Speaker 1: doesn't address what you were wondering at all. Instead, it's
Speaker 1: just looking to convert you into a customer of some sort,
Speaker 1: and instead you would have to scroll down past those
Speaker 1: paid spots to find the actual results that didn't pay
Speaker 1: to be there. They're just rising to the top because
Speaker 1: of Google's page rank system. That's not a great user
Speaker 1: experience if you feel like you constantly have to skip
Speaker 1: the first few results in order to see things that
Speaker 1: aren't tainted by the fact that people paid to be there. Plus,
Speaker 1: there was this concern of Google scooping up so much
Speaker 1: personal information in an effort to target ads more effectively
Speaker 1: that it was a threat to privacy. That's a huge issue,
Speaker 1: at least for some users it is. I think anyone
Speaker 1: who actually spends a little serious time thinking over the
Speaker 1: implications of privacy ultimately arrives at a fairly dark conclusion
Speaker 1: of about most of the web these days. It's hard
Speaker 1: to avoid, particularly if you're talking about companies like Google
Speaker 1: or Meta that leans so heavily on advertising as the
Speaker 1: majority of their revenue source. These companies have found far
Speaker 1: more value in targeted advertising than just general advertising, so
Speaker 1: by its very nature, these companies are dependent upon leveraging
Speaker 1: your information as effectively as possible in an effort to
Speaker 1: make more money. Then there's the perception that Google search
Speaker 1: results are just you know, not as good as they
Speaker 1: used to be. And it's true that Google changes up
Speaker 1: how its search algorithm works on occasion. When I wrote
Speaker 1: for how Stuff Works, that was a constant source of anxiety.
Speaker 1: Early on, when I worked at HowStuffWorks dot com, that
Speaker 1: website consistently ranked very high in search results, at least
Speaker 1: for you know, queries that related to stuff that was
Speaker 1: on our website. If we had an article about something
Speaker 1: about how something worked, and you were searching for something
Speaker 1: along those lines, our website often would pop up at
Speaker 1: the very top of the search results, and that meant
Speaker 1: we got a lot of incoming traffic from people who
Speaker 1: were just looking stuff up. And it was always our
Speaker 1: goal to make HowStuffWorks dot Com a destination website on
Speaker 1: its own. It would be a place for people to
Speaker 1: go to just by choice, just to browse around, not
Speaker 1: just when they were looking for a specific answer. But
Speaker 1: that just was kind of a pipe dream. The simple
Speaker 1: truth of it was the vast majority of visitors who
Speaker 1: went to how Stuffworks dot Com arrived there via search,
Speaker 1: and that meant we were heavily dependent upon how Google
Speaker 1: ranked us. And unfortunately for How Stuff Works, our ranking changed,
Speaker 1: and it changed while I was actually there. Now, keep
Speaker 1: in mind, I've worked the same job since two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven, but the company around me has changed like
Speaker 1: six times. But yeah, back with How Stuffworks, Google made
Speaker 1: some adjustments to its search algorithm and How Stuff Works
Speaker 1: did not pop up quite so frequently. Now, I don't
Speaker 1: think it was just Google punishing How Stuff Works. I
Speaker 1: think there were some complicating factors, the big one being
Speaker 1: that at the time we were owned by Discovery Communications,
Speaker 1: and some might argue that How Stuff Works had become
Speaker 1: kind of a dumping ground for a lot of lower
Speaker 1: quality article topics. The writing was still top notch, the
Speaker 1: writers were still doing a great job, but the subject
Speaker 1: matter of the articles, it just wasn't the type of
Speaker 1: stuff that we would typically pitch During our weekly content meetings.
Speaker 1: We would get these assignments that would be related to
Speaker 1: big ad deals. This is not a joke. There was
Speaker 1: one time where we had a package, an ad package
Speaker 1: that was related to the topic of towing, as in
Speaker 1: towing something behind your car. And I don't remember how
Speaker 1: many articles were part of that package. I want to
Speaker 1: say it was something ludicrous like eighty articles. Now, that
Speaker 1: could just be a drastic exaggeration, but in my mind,
Speaker 1: it wasn't that much of an exaggeration because I know
Speaker 1: I wrote at least five articles about towing and I
Speaker 1: don't even drive, y'all, And that was part of the
Speaker 1: issue I think that heard our rankings and Google search.
Speaker 1: Another was that we had to write a lot of
Speaker 1: articles that were tied to various discovery shows, and some
Speaker 1: Discovery shows I really liked. I thought they were high quality,
Speaker 1: like MythBusters, for example, writing articles relating to MythBusters that
Speaker 1: was fun. But other shows felt less fun like they
Speaker 1: were more exploitative, shows that leaned heavily on othering, for
Speaker 1: example by taking some people and then saying, oh, aren't
Speaker 1: they odd for one reason or another? Or they were
Speaker 1: shows that had almost a side show kind of vibe
Speaker 1: to them. I'm not going to name any because I
Speaker 1: don't want to give any more attention to them. But
Speaker 1: there were some shows that I thought I felt really
Speaker 1: icky about, and occasionally How Stuff Works authors would have
Speaker 1: to write articles relating to that stuff too. Thankfully I
Speaker 1: didn't get those assignments, at least not most of the
Speaker 1: time anyway. In my opinion, the combination of Google changing
Speaker 1: its search algorithm and How Stuff Works generating a lot
Speaker 1: of arguably lower quality content, again not because of the
Speaker 1: writing but just because of the subject matter, led to
Speaker 1: our page not ranking as highly in search results, and
Speaker 1: that hurt How Stuff Works a lot. As traffic began
Speaker 1: to slow down. Even our fans made note of that.
Speaker 1: It became kind of a joke that you would start
Speaker 1: calling how stuff works how towing works. But that's all
Speaker 1: water under the bridge these days. At last I heard
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works had shifted dramatically by firing the entire
Speaker 1: editorial staff, switching to AI generated articles, and then using
Speaker 1: contractors as editors to give those articles a look see
Speaker 1: to make sure they weren't wildly inaccurate. I do not
Speaker 1: know if that's still the case, however it may have
Speaker 1: changed anyway. Kind of got off topic there, My apologies.
Speaker 1: This is something I'm passionate about. Let's take another quick break.
Speaker 1: When I get back, I'll straighten out. We'll get back
Speaker 1: on topic. We're back. So before I went to the
Speaker 1: ad break, I was talking about how there was this
Speaker 1: general perception that Google search results just weren't the same
Speaker 1: quality as they used to be. And yeah, with How
Speaker 1: stuff Works, you could argue part of the reason for
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works this particular fate wasn't that Google's results
Speaker 1: had declined in quality, but that the content on How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works was declining in quality. But generally speaking, people
Speaker 1: were saying Google search results just aren't very good, like
Speaker 1: I'm not finding what I need to find. So that
Speaker 1: led to some people asking for alternatives to Google. They
Speaker 1: found that the privacy issue, the advertising issues, those were
Speaker 1: just having too big of an impact on the actual
Speaker 1: search results. This brings me to an article in Wired
Speaker 1: back in twenty eighteen. It was written by Brian Barrett
Speaker 1: and it's titled I used only Bing for three months.
Speaker 1: Here's what I found and what I didn't Now. Barrett
Speaker 1: first used the bing search app, So this is the
Speaker 1: mobile app that at the time included specific types of
Speaker 1: search ranging from videos to news, to music to gas.
Speaker 1: So I guess if you wanted to search for gas
Speaker 1: stations that are close to you, you could do that,
Speaker 1: or petrol stations if you prefer. You know. Obviously Google
Speaker 1: has different subcategories of search as well, like Google News,
Speaker 1: so this is not that unusual. But it was a
Speaker 1: pretty wild variety of topics that Barrett encountered, and Barrett
Speaker 1: claimed that the different tabs led to presentations of search
Speaker 1: results and just general content that varied in usefulness and coherence,
Speaker 1: like if you navigated to the near me tab, for example,
Speaker 1: you would get certain stuff served up to you automatically
Speaker 1: before you would even start searching. Same with any of
Speaker 1: the others. But he did say the near metab presented
Speaker 1: him with an array of things located close by, including
Speaker 1: an ar augmented reality style feature where you could hold
Speaker 1: up your phone and using the rear facing camera, it
Speaker 1: would display results in your screen for plays that were
Speaker 1: near you, like in the direction that you were holding
Speaker 1: your phone, so you can hold up your phone and
Speaker 1: see that maybe down the street there's like a little
Speaker 1: Mexican restaurant, and it would include stuff like the rating
Speaker 1: for that restaurant and maybe the hours for it, just
Speaker 1: by holding up your phone and looking at the screen
Speaker 1: as you move your camera around, which is pretty nifty,
Speaker 1: particularly for back in twenty eighteen, because we're still talking
Speaker 1: about implementations that are essentially the same thing, and it's
Speaker 1: six years later now. Now. Overall, Barrett's experiences seemed like
Speaker 1: he found the taxonomy and organization of the Being search
Speaker 1: app a little weird and haphazard. The actual search was
Speaker 1: pretty straightforward, but the stuff that was presented on each
Speaker 1: tab like a landing page, that's what seemed very weird
Speaker 1: to him. I recommend reading the article to get the
Speaker 1: full effect of what he was saying. Again, that's in wired.
Speaker 1: I used only Being for three months. Here's what I
Speaker 1: found and what I didn't. Now. Barrett said that for
Speaker 1: the most part, being delivered search results that were at
Speaker 1: least as good as Google's, although there was an exception.
Speaker 1: If Barrett searched for a specific article that had been
Speaker 1: published on Wired, he found it was really challenging to
Speaker 1: get BING to return relevant search results, Like they just
Speaker 1: weren't popping up, even if he included several words found
Speaker 1: in the headline of the article, or he included the
Speaker 1: site like he wrote like in Wired, or if he
Speaker 1: included the author who wrote the original piece, and that's
Speaker 1: just kind of odd. But otherwise, he said, his take
Speaker 1: was quote search is search is search end quote, meaning
Speaker 1: that it's pretty unremarkable for the most part, Like, as
Speaker 1: long as you're doing it, okay, it's good enough. And
Speaker 1: it's not like Google has the market on effective web search.
Speaker 1: They just have the market on search in general. Now.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty one, Bloomberg reported that a lawyer for
Speaker 1: Google had a bit of ironic information for the world,
Speaker 1: and that was that the top searched term on bing
Speaker 1: was in fact Google. Now, if that's true, that has
Speaker 1: to stay. So why would the lawyer even bring this up? Well,
Speaker 1: that was because Google was already in a stew because
Speaker 1: regulators around the world were looking at the company's dominant
Speaker 1: position and web search something that's still going on today,
Speaker 1: and the argument was that Google held the equivalent of
Speaker 1: a monopoly, and yeah, if you're hovering around ninety percent
Speaker 1: of the market share, you kind of are a monopoly.
Speaker 1: I mean, if nine out of ten web searches around
Speaker 1: the world are happening on your platform and the other
Speaker 1: one out of ten are divided up among all your competitors,
Speaker 1: that's a pretty bleak picture as far as competition is concerned.
Speaker 1: But Google's response was, Hey, it's not our fault. We
Speaker 1: give the best search results. Even our largest competitor, Microsoft
Speaker 1: bing sees that the top search query in their own
Speaker 1: search tool is for us. How is it our fault
Speaker 1: that we're doing it better than anybody else, or how
Speaker 1: is it a bad thing? The verge is Mitchell Clark
Speaker 1: looked into this in October twenty twenty one and found
Speaker 1: that a third party SEO analysis firm called au Refs
Speaker 1: AhR EFS backed up what Google's lawyer claimed that Google
Speaker 1: was in fact the top searched term on bing, followed
Speaker 1: by YouTube, which of course is another Google property. Then
Speaker 1: Facebook and then whoopseee back to Google with Gmail. Yikes,
Speaker 1: but that's global searches. If you restricted it to US
Speaker 1: based searches, it would change. Actually Google fell to third place,
Speaker 1: Facebook took the top spot, but still Google being a
Speaker 1: top five search item on the BING search tool. That's rough. Also,
Speaker 1: here's another fun fact. Bing was the seventh most searched
Speaker 1: term on BING, which definitely sounds weird, right, like, why
Speaker 1: would someone go to bing to search baning because you're
Speaker 1: already there? But as Clark points out in his article,
Speaker 1: that could come down to people using a platform that
Speaker 1: has being set as the default search engine, but it's
Speaker 1: not being itself. So let's say that you know, you're
Speaker 1: on a desktop app or a mobile app and BING
Speaker 1: is powering the search, but it's not, you know, branded
Speaker 1: as BING, then maybe you would search ban in there
Speaker 1: to go straight to the BING search page itself as
Speaker 1: opposed to just the search bar inside the app. That
Speaker 1: makes sense. In fact, that could also be how it's
Speaker 1: happening with Google that people want to go to the
Speaker 1: Google home page and so they're just typing in Google
Speaker 1: in whatever platform they happen to be in, and sometimes
Speaker 1: that's powered by bing, So I bet Google is actually
Speaker 1: a fairly high search term in Google's own search queries
Speaker 1: as well, right, Like, I don't think it's just that
Speaker 1: people are on bing and they're like, Oh, I don't
Speaker 1: want to be here, let's look for Google anyway. In
Speaker 1: late twenty twenty two, Microsoft engineers began to work with
Speaker 1: another technology that would change search and this is generative AI.
Speaker 1: So before OpenAI began to dominate headlines in late twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, Microsoft already had access to the GPT for
Speaker 1: Large Language Model and was probing its capabilities. Microsoft engineers
Speaker 1: were really impressed with the performance of the Large Language Model,
Speaker 1: and they began working on a search tool that could
Speaker 1: tap into those capabilities and combine them with search results.
Speaker 1: And they called it Prometheus, which is a humble name
Speaker 1: to be sure, that's sarcasm. So Prometheus was a tool
Speaker 1: that could mix generative AI responses with search results and
Speaker 1: provide answers to a user that, if everything worked as intended,
Speaker 1: might give all the information needed for basic queries, or
Speaker 1: it could serve as a good start for a deeper
Speaker 1: dive into the topic. Microsoft would ultimately develop Prometheus into
Speaker 1: a new feature in being called Bing chat a chat
Speaker 1: GPT like aiic conversationalist that could answer questions all by itself. Now,
Speaker 1: most of the time those answers were perfectly cromulent, to
Speaker 1: quote the Simpsons, but in other cases you would get outliers.
Speaker 1: You get really weird stuff where the chatbot would present
Speaker 1: incorrect or bizarre responses, sometimes like emotionally tinged responses, and
Speaker 1: often this fell into the category of hallucinations or confabulations.
Speaker 1: In other words, the stuff that where an AI model
Speaker 1: starts to statistically select the most likely following word, but
Speaker 1: it turns out it's the wrong word or the wrong
Speaker 1: series of words, and that you know, just sometimes the
Speaker 1: correct answer is an outlier statistically speaking, but AI models
Speaker 1: follow the most likely statistical response, and so sometimes you
Speaker 1: get weird stuff. Kevin Russ of The New York Times
Speaker 1: wrote that the AI powered search propelled Being into becoming
Speaker 1: his favorite search engine initially, but he followed that up
Speaker 1: with another piece just a little bit later, in which
Speaker 1: he said that further interactions with the AI powered chatbot
Speaker 1: made him feel kind of unsettled, and it dethroned Being
Speaker 1: from being his favorite search engine. To read about his
Speaker 1: uncanny chat encounter with Bing. You need to check out
Speaker 1: his article from February sixteenth, twenty twenty three, in the
Speaker 1: New York Times. It's titled a conversation with Bing's chatbot
Speaker 1: left me deeply unsettled. And yeah, he explains like this
Speaker 1: interaction convinced him that AI is not really ready for
Speaker 1: regular interactions with humanity, that those sort of things can
Speaker 1: turn in a way that one are not necessarily helpful
Speaker 1: and two can be outright disturbing, Which is an interesting take.
Speaker 1: But Microsoft has famously invested heavily in artificial intelligence, so
Speaker 1: I don't think we're backing out of AI powered search
Speaker 1: anytime soon. It's one of those elements where Microsoft really
Speaker 1: believes they can take a solid shot at Google. Google
Speaker 1: obviously has also invested heavily in AI powered search, although
Speaker 1: Google's attempts have received a lot of ridicule based upon
Speaker 1: some bad results. I mean, you know, being told that
Speaker 1: the best way to keep cheese on your pizza is
Speaker 1: by mixing glue in with the cheese is not great,
Speaker 1: not a great look. So yeah, the Google's had its
Speaker 1: own setbacks when it comes to generative AI incorporated within search,
Speaker 1: and I think Microsoft sees that as a real opportunity
Speaker 1: to make a bigger dent in Google's dominance. And again,
Speaker 1: when every percentage point is equivalent to a couple of
Speaker 1: billion dollars of revenue, that's a worthy endeavor. Notably, Microsoft
Speaker 1: is dedicated around fourteen billion dollars into open ai. That's
Speaker 1: that's the company that created GPT and chat GPT. But
Speaker 1: more recently the two companies appeared to be reevaluating that relationship.
Speaker 1: There's been a lot of articles published about how Microsoft
Speaker 1: is looking at diversifying its approach to artificial intelligence, that
Speaker 1: people at the company executives that the company have started
Speaker 1: to question whether it's wise to depend so heavily upon
Speaker 1: a partner company for AI capabilities, and that perhaps it
Speaker 1: might be better to spread out and look at other
Speaker 1: opportunities for AI and not just hit your wagon to
Speaker 1: open AI's horse. Meanwhile, open ai has said, hey, should
Speaker 1: we ever get to a point where we create artificial
Speaker 1: general intelligence, we're severing the relationship with Microsoft so that
Speaker 1: they cannot use AGI because we're too worried that Microsoft
Speaker 1: would use it for bad reasons and we would get
Speaker 1: negative consequences. Also, open ai has reserved the right to
Speaker 1: define what AGI is and decide when they get there,
Speaker 1: So it essentially feels like it's a bargaining chip that
Speaker 1: open ai is saying, hey, unless you continue to fund
Speaker 1: us with billions of dollars each year, because AI is expensive,
Speaker 1: and if we don't get billions of dollars, we will
Speaker 1: spend ourselves out of business. Then we're going to take
Speaker 1: our toys and you're not going to be able to
Speaker 1: use them, and then you're really going to be behind Google. Again,
Speaker 1: that seems to be what's going on, at least from
Speaker 1: my perspective at the corporate level, and that's kind of
Speaker 1: where BING is right now. Does it become this heavily
Speaker 1: AI dependent search tool that can potentially take a big
Speaker 1: chunk out of Google's search dominance. It raises other questions
Speaker 1: as well, like if a search engine ends up giving
Speaker 1: you the material you need without you having to go
Speaker 1: through and click on a link, then what good is
Speaker 1: the search engine as a search engine? Because if the
Speaker 1: traffic is not ultimately going to the companies that host
Speaker 1: the information provided to create those answers, then those companies
Speaker 1: are ultimately going to go out of business, and then
Speaker 1: you no longer have a source of information to pull
Speaker 1: from to get those answers that you need in the
Speaker 1: first place. So, in other words, the fear is that generative,
Speaker 1: a eye powered search will ultimately cannibalize the Internet and
Speaker 1: kill the source of info that it depends upon in
Speaker 1: order to give us answers, and instead we're going to
Speaker 1: get answers that get less and less good as time
Speaker 1: goes on, until ultimately we arrive at ideocracy. All roads
Speaker 1: lead to idiocracy eventually. Is the saying that I just
Speaker 1: made all right on that cheerful note. I hope all
Speaker 1: of you out there are doing well. If you are
Speaker 1: in the United States and you have not yet voted,
Speaker 1: the election day is tomorrow, November fifth. No matter what
Speaker 1: flubbs someone might say, it's not January fifth, it's November fifth.
Speaker 1: Go out there and vote. Do your research, make an
Speaker 1: informed decision. The future of the country depends upon it.
Speaker 1: The future of democracy depends upon it. Democracy only works
Speaker 1: if people participate in it. So do your research, get
Speaker 1: out to your polling place and vote if you haven't already.
Speaker 1: And for those of you around the world, I wish
Speaker 1: you the absolute best. I hope you're doing well, and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech stuff is
Speaker 1: an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.