In December 2023, Microsoft announced some new features that were coming to its Copilot generative AI service. At the same time, it also revealed the experimental Bing Deep Search feature for its search engine.
Bing Deep Search was developed as a way to help people get more details on their internet search results by combining Bing"s search features with the OpenAI GPT-4 large language model. However, the search results don"t show up instantly and may take up to 30 seconds to generate.
At the time, Microsoft said it would let Bing Deep Search become "available to randomly selected small groups of users on Bing worldwide." However, it looks like this feature has now been removed from Microsoft public flighting to fix some issues.
A few days ago, a person asked Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft"s new leader of its Windows and Web Experiences team, why they were unable to access Bing Deep Search for a week. Parakhin replied that it would be "Coming back soon."
It turned out to be more popular than we anticipated (we really though it is more of a research tool), need to fix caching and make more robust. Coming back soon. Running now as a "shadow flight" - you don"t see it, but the queries are issued, to stress the infrastructure.
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) February 7, 2024
Parakhin added that the new feature was "more popular than we anticipated." That indicates that even with a limited number of public testers, lots of them decided to access Bing Deep Search. Parakhin said that the development teams needed to "fix caching" and also to make the feature "more robust."
Right now,Bing Deep Search is being tested as a "shadow flight" with queries sending to the infrastructure for processing.
Hopefully, once Microsoft makes Bing Deep Search available to more people, we will be able to see just how accurate and popular this feature will become.