Earlier this week, Microsoft's CEO added to all the promises that've been made about how the company is taking the drive to fix Windows 11 very seriously, although there was an element here which I found less reassuring.

Windows Central picked up on chief executive Satya Nadella's little speech, which came as part of Microsoft's recent earnings call (following its fiscal Q3 results).

Nadella said: "When it comes to our consumer business, we are doing the foundational work required to win back fans and strengthen engagement across Windows, Xbox, Bing, and Edge. In the near term, we are focused on fundamentals, prioritizing quality and serving our core users better."

"With Windows, we recently announced performance improvements for lower memory devices, streamlined the Windows Update experience, and brought back focus to core features and fundamentals that matter most to our customers."

Nadella further referenced Xbox along the same lines, stating that Microsoft is "recommitting to our core fans and players" and citing the changes to Game Pass last week as an example of how the company is "staying responsive to customer feedback" (another major theme with Windows 11 of late).

What's interesting here is that the CEO wouldn't normally be drawn to comment so directly on Windows, especially not from a consumer point of view as seen here. And he's also addressing how Microsoft wants to "serve" those consumers better, and even referring to them as "core users", as if they're more important than corporations. (And it's true that while consumers are more numerous, just about, the business side of Windows makes a lot more money for Microsoft).

It's great to see Nadella comment so frankly on the situation with consumers, and it's telling about the importance of overhauling Windows 11 and making the OS much better. It shows that the CEO – and the company – realizes the gravity of the situation that Windows 11 has found itself in, and that Microsoft really is taking this seriously, which, as already noted, underlines a whole lot of signs in a similar vein of late.

Bing it on

So, that's all good, but I'm about to nitpick somewhat, because there's something that worries me in Nadella's key statements above. Let's rewind back to this sentence, on the "work required to win back fans and strengthen engagement across Windows, Xbox, Bing, and Edge."

Bolstering Windows, yes, that's great, and Xbox, fine and dandy, all good — but Bing and Edge. Wait a minute — where do Bing and Edge come into it?

Yeah, I know. Bing and Edge are important to Microsoft, clearly. But this is messaging from the CEO which is specifically aimed at consumers, and acknowledging these "core users", remember? How much does the average consumer use Bing or Edge?

Not a lot, frankly. Okay, so Edge is the second most-used desktop web browser, but it's a long way behind Chrome, and adoption has remained lackluster going by the market share figures I've seen (just over 10% or so).

And yes, Bing has hit a billion active users for the first time, which Nadella also announced, but how much does the average consumer care about it? Not much, I'd argue, and if you look at search engine market share (on desktop), Bing is on about 10%, which is as far behind Google as Edge lags Chrome. I'm guessing a lot of Bing's billion users are from the business world (and that a good deal of fresh traffic has been driven by Copilot queries).

So, the question is: why bring Bing and Edge into a statement that's firmly targeted at consumers?

True, this is all part of an earnings report, and Nadella evidently has investors in mind here, too, as a result. But this kind of encapsulates one of my concerns about the big Windows 11 revamp: that Microsoft wants to please consumers, yet it constantly has one eye on investors, and the monetary part of the equation.

Of course it's interested in the financial side of the equation, you may well be muttering to yourself under your breath at this point: it's a business, it exists to make money. However, I worry that the mention of Bing and Edge in the same breath as Windows 11 and Xbox in a speech focused on consumers is a somewhat concerning glimpse into the inner workings of Microsoft's collective mind here.

Remember that one of the promises of the 'fix Windows 11 initiative' was to chill out on all the upselling activity in the OS? That was the response of a key Microsoft exec to a jab at Windows 11 and specifically about pushing Edge and Bing in an advert-like way within the operating system's interface.

And yet, here we are, basking in the glow of Nadella's commendable promises to 'win back fans' with Windows 11, which in the same breath has a nod to the shareholders along the lines of 'don't worry, we've not forgotten about Bing and Edge either'.

I've never had much faith that Microsoft is going to relent with the kind of promotional activity that has been a hallmark of parts of the Windows 11 interface (the Start menu, Settings app, and notifications center in particular), and this thorn amongst the rosy consumer-targeted comments from Nadella does little to convince me otherwise.

A dominant desktop force

It's noteworthy that Nadella also took the time to share news of a new high for active Windows devices, which now exceed 1.6 billion globally. This is a clear reminder of the dominance of Windows in the desktop world, in a time where people are increasingly talking about the threat Linux poses. (On the latter score, it's notable that Microsoft is also making promises relating to better gaming performance for Windows 11 versus that seen on SteamOS, too).

I don't want to detract too much from what Nadella said here — it represents a mainly comforting backing up of what Microsoft has already laid out on the table. However, while it's a telling reinforcement of intent, I do find it ironic that Bing and Edge were mentioned alongside Windows and Xbox here, when for consumers, their main desire is to see the latter two forces banished from Windows 11 for good. (Well, that's not entirely fair, but it's certainly true for some folks going by many of the comments you see on the likes of Reddit — although the less noisy majority simply just don't care about either Bing or Edge, one way or another, I suspect).

I really hope that Microsoft can make a key move in improving Windows 11 by reining in all the promos and upselling for Edge, Bing, OneDrive, Microsoft Accounts, and so forth. This would be a huge fan-pleaser, and I'd rank it as close to the importance of fixing QA and testing for Windows 11 (which I've already banged on about recently).

However, I have my cynical hat on here (along with my skeptical shades), and I remain unconvinced that much will change about upselling in Windows 11 at all. And Nadella's comments here haven't helped soothe my fears, let's put it that way. I think Microsoft needs to tread carefully and look at some of the reaction to this online, because while the CEO is talking about 'winning back fans', there are Redditors pouring scorn on the idea that there were fans of the OS in the first place.

As one Reddit poster phrased it: "Windows 11 fans? Are there any? I thought people use Windows because it runs games and most software, not because they're fans."

And another in the same thread observed: "IDK if I've met a Windows fan in the last decade. It's more like 'tolerators.'"

Microsoft is priding itself on listening to feedback now, so I think it must take note, and focus on turning 'tolerators' into users with a good deal more enthusiasm for Windows 11. And here's a clue — the key to swaying those opinions very definitely doesn't involve anything to do with Bing or Edge.

• Cybercriminals exploit OpenClaw’s popularity with fake variants
• Malicious GitHub repos deliver Vidar and GhostSocks malware
• Malvertising campaigns spread tainted installers via Bing

Whenever a new trendy app or software emerges, cybercriminals try to capitalize on it by smuggling tainted, or outright fake, variants. We’ve seen it numerous times before, for example when ChatGPT first came out.

Now, we’re seeing the same with OpenClaw, the open source AI agent platform which grew immensely popular due to its ability to run tasks directly on a computer, such as reading files, sending messages, or running commands. It is currently one of the most popular AI projects, with more than 100,000 stars on GitHub.

However, there are also fake variants on GitHub that deploy various malware families to the victims - and in a new report, security researchers Huntress said the primary payload is Vidar, an infostealer that collects sensitive data such as credentials and user information from apps like Telegram. It is being dropped through loaders that execute the stealer directly in memory.

Malvertising on Bing

The loaders also sometimes deploy GhostSocks, a proxy malware that turns infected machines into residential proxies. Criminals use these proxies to route malicious traffic, often selling it as a service.

According to Huntress, these fakes were added to GitHub on February 2, and remained there until February 10, when they were spotted and removed.

Being hosted on GitHub was dangerous enough, since the platform is regarded as trustworthy and millions of people use it every day (despite it often being used as a launchpad for malware distribution). Making matters worse was a malvertising campaign on Bing.

The researchers said they spotted the attack when a user downloaded and ran the fake installer. "Analysis revealed that this user had searched for the term OpenClaw Windows through Bing and had the AI suggestion link directly to a newly created malicious GitHub repository openclaw-installer," they explained.

Whenever a new popular app comes along, cybercriminals start advertising fake variants on popular networks. Sometimes they’ll advertise a non-existent premium version, and sometimes a version for an unsupported platform.

• Rhysida spoofed Microsoft Teams ads on Bing to deliver malware via fake download pages
• Victims received OysterLoader and Latrodectus, which deploy ransomware, backdoors, and infostealers
• Group operates on RaaS model; past targets include airports, libraries, and U.S. school districts

Security researchers have once again found poisoned ads on popular ad networks, spoofing major brands to deliver all sorts of nasties.

Experts at Expel spotted a new malware distribution campaign conducted by the Rhysida ransomware group which apparently began in June 2025, and is still ongoing at press time.

For the campaign, Rhysida’s operatives created landing pages to imitate download sites for Microsoft Teams, one of the world’s most popular online collaboration platforms. Then, they set up new ads on Microsoft’s Bing search engine to promote these pages.

Abusing .LNK files

Victims who would search for Microsoft Teams via Bing would likely see an ad at the top of their search engine results page and, given Microsoft’s and Bing’s good standing, would probably trust them enough to click on the links. Then, they would be redirected to a page that is seemingly identical to the actual Teams download page, but with a big difference - this one deploys two pieces of malware: OysterLoader, and Latrodectus.

Both Latrodectus and OysterLoader are, as the latter’s name suggests, a loader, delivering different stage-two malware depending on the attacker’s needs at any given time. That can include infostealers, backdoors, various remote access trojans, and most notably - ransomware

In fact, the Rhysida group is a famous ransomware operator. It works on a RaaS principle - developing and maintaining the encryptor, while its affiliates breach their targets’ networks and deploy the malware - for a share of the profits.

There had been several notable breaches attributed to the Rhysida gang including the 2023 attack on the British Library (when roughly 600GB of files were taken), the 2024 attack on the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, as well as multiple attacks on government and education organizations (City of Columbus, multiple US school districts and institutions, and more).

Via The Register

• Microsoft has launched MAI‑Image‑1, its first in-house text-to-image model
• The model focuses on speed, photorealism, and flexibility, aiming to avoid repetitive visual tropes
• MAI-Image-I is coming soon to Copilot and Bing

Microsoft has just introduced MAI‑Image‑1, its first in-house text-to-image generator. By building the model in-house, Microsoft is staking a new claim, competing not only with industry heavyweights like Google’s Nano Banana and Midjourney, but also with its otherwise very close partner, OpenAI’s own line of AI image models.

MAI‑Image‑1 has already cracked the top 10 on the LMArena leaderboard, a public benchmarking platform where it's the only place it's available for now. That will change soon, however, as Microsoft says the model will soon be rolled into Copilot and Bing Image Creator.

Microsoft is particularly proud of MAI-Image-1's photorealistic production values and the controllable lighting and textures. The idea for the company was to offer AI images that don't look like those made by other models, setting itself apart from the common aesthetic familiar to anyone who has seen many AI images, particularly of the 'slop' form proliferating on social media.

The key was to curate the training data and work with professional creatives to tune the model, testing it against how it would be used by the average person. Microsoft hopes MAI will make Midjourney or Stable Diffusion models seem erratic and slow by comparison.

Microsoft's own AI images

Microsoft has been investing heavily in embedding AI in everything it makes, but that has mostly meant OpenAI tools.

That’s changing as of now, though. MAI-Image-1 now joins the MAI‑1 and MAI‑Voice‑1 homegrown language and speech models. MAI‑Image‑1 is the next puzzle piece.

Of course, the average person won't notice any of that. They'll just either like or be annoyed by whatever image Microsoft PowerPoint's AI produces when they are building a presentation. The company says its focus on realism and usefulness means people will be quite pleased. There will be fewer dreamlike blobs and more images that actually work in documents, ads, and presentations.

Because the question isn’t “who has an image model?” It’s “who has a useful one that people will actually use in real tools?” That’s where Microsoft is gambling that MAI‑Image‑1 will shine.

For creative professionals, this could mean a faster path from prompt to polished concept. For everyday users, it means fewer frustrating gaps between idea and execution. And for Microsoft, if users love the model, it makes the entire AI Copilot ecosystem more appealing. If it falls flat, it may need to turn back to OpenAI for help.

For now, though, it seems Microsoft's era of relying on OpenAI is over. The future of AI tools will be about who builds them and where they appear as much as what they can actually do and what problems they solve. With MAI‑Image‑1, Microsoft is saying it wants to answer all those questions itself.

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• Microsoft could make the Windows 11 taskbar search box fire up your default browser and search engine, rather than Edge and Bing
• This is based on clues in an early test version of its Edge browser
• The EEA region already has the benefit of this change, so the hope is very much that Microsoft is considering rolling this out globally

Microsoft might just make a much-wanted change to Windows 11 in terms of having the search box open up a query in the operating system's default web browser rather than Edge.

Windows Latest reports that there are flags in a test build of the Edge browser (in the Canary channel), which are a hint that Microsoft is working on this functionality, though it may not ever come to fruition.

The flags in question are for features related to the 'WSB' or Windows Search Bar – meaning the search box on the taskbar – or so Windows Latest theorizes, and this seems likely (though technically WSB could refer to Windows Sandbox, which doesn't fit with the context).

One of the flags indicates that the default browser will be used from the search box instead of Edge, and there's also a flag for the default search engine to be used instead of Bing. On top of that, Windows Latest further uncovered a flag to invoke both of those behaviors.

In that latter case, it would mean that if you ran a search in the taskbar that produced a web result, instead of using Edge and Bing automatically, Windows 11 would bring up your chosen default browser and search engine (Chrome and Google, perhaps, or Firefox and DuckDuckGo – whatever you've picked).

Note that these are hidden developments in Edge so far, but they'd theoretically be linked to broader changes in Windows 11 whereby the mentioned defaults would be respected by Microsoft.

Analysis: leveling the Windows playing field

Respecting your default service and app choices is, of course, exactly how things should work, but they don't. Microsoft would rather summon its own browser and search engine in Windows 11 whenever it can. If that annoys Windows 11 users, then so be it – things have been this way for a long time.

Well, that's not quite true for everyone, as notably, not so long ago, Microsoft tweaked Windows 11 in the EEA (European Economic Area) to follow this behavior. Yes, folks in Europe have their default browser and search engine choices adhered to by the Windows search box due to legislation in the EU (the Digital Markets Act).

So, what this move – if it happens – will be about is bringing everyone else in the world in line with those European countries. That'd be a big step forward for Microsoft in my book, and doubtless a popular move, helping to diminish the perception around Windows 11 starting to become a two-tier OS based on what region you live in. (This is a point I recently discussed regarding a helpful change to extended free updates for Windows 10 that's happening in the EEA only.)

However, before we get carried away with the notion of this great levelling of the search box playing field, this is still a nebulous hint indeed. Flags tucked away in an early test build of Edge are a very vague clue, and even more so because we're guessing somewhat at their meaning.

Even so, this is a tantalizing suggestion that Microsoft might be moving in the right direction, though I'll only believe it when I see it.

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• Microsoft has a new (and somewhat duplicitous) promotion going on
• It happens when searching for a rival AI service on Bing
• A Copilot banner appears at the top of the results, and it's easy for users to mistakenly use that instead of the AI they were really looking for

Microsoft is up to some sneaky tricks again in terms of promoting its own services, and this time it's Copilot AI, which is now being pushed on those using Bing search.

As Windows Latest reports, if you go to Bing.com and search for a major AI service that rivals Microsoft's own Copilot - meaning ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, or Claude AI - you'll get a Copilot banner popping up.

This appears right at the top of the search, announcing that 'Your Copilot is here' and offering a prompt to ask Microsoft's AI 'anything'. You can then type a query in the presented box if you want, and it'll open up the Copilot website with the results.

This behavior is implemented via the Bing search site itself, so it'll happen if you go to Bing.com in any web browser (not just Edge).

Analysis: spotlight and shade

While the Copilot banner that Bing search serves up is labelled as 'Promoted by Microsoft', the company has chosen a very small font for that particular detail, so it's easy enough to miss.

In fact, the way the search result is laid out in this scenario is quite deceptive in a few aspects. So, say you search for ChatGPT in Bing, the ChatGPT website is the top result (as you'd expect, of course), but the way the Copilot banner is perched right above it could trick you into thinking the query box is actually for ChatGPT. Some people might not realize that and then end up redirected to the Copilot website with their query, which is clearly the idea. If the Copilot banner was presented to the side, for example - out of the way - this would be much less likely to happen.

Furthermore, if you leave the tab with the Bing search for ChatGPT (or the other mentioned AI services), and then return to it, the Copilot banner is actually highlighted in bright white, with the rest of the results greyed out. The banner is effectively spotlighted - check out the above screenshot to see what I mean - so people are even more likely to be drawn to it, especially if they aren't tech-savvy and don't really look at the page properly.

All in all, this feels like a bit of unwelcome duplicity, but in truth, it's nothing new for Microsoft - or other tech giants, for that matter. Microsoft is particularly keen on prompting folks to use its Edge browser in one way or another, including if you try to download Chrome. Indeed, searching for Chrome in Bing.com results in a very similar 'Promoted by Microsoft' banner at the top of the results (and we've seen even shadier moves than this in the past).

And yes, Google pulls this sort of chicanery as well, and if you head to Google.com you'll be prompted to make use of its AI, Gemini, with a pop-up. That said, if you search for 'Copilot' on Google, you won't get Gemini inserted into the search results in the same way Microsoft does with Copilot in Bing.

At any rate, while it's very unlikely this kind of promotional nonsense will ever go away, it's disappointing to see a somewhat more blatant example from Microsoft here - particularly in the highlighting of the Copilot query box, should you flick away from the active tab, and then switch back.

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• Windows 10 has a new update that adds a couple of features
• Unfortunately, one of these is focused on promoting Bing and Edge
• Microsoft is pushing its search engine and browser via the calendar panel off the taskbar

Windows 10 has a new update and it actually introduces a new feature – although you might wish it didn’t when you discover what this latest addition is.

That said, the freshly-released update for June (which is KB5060533 for Windows 10 22H2) does come with a tweak that could raise a smile, namely that the clock in the taskbar now displays the seconds when you click to view the time in the calendar panel.

Quite why Microsoft ditched that in the first place is beyond me, but anyway, while that might be a pleasing return of a feature for some, there’s a sting in the tail further down in said calendar flyout – namely that Bing has crept into the mix here.

Not overtly, mind, but as Windows Latest explains, there’s been a change to the bottom section of the calendar panel where normally you’ll see your own events or reminders – if you have any, that is. If you don’t, this used to be blank, but as of the June update you’ll see popular public events and their dates.

Of course, pretty much every day is now dedicated to something – for example, today, June 11, is ‘National Corn on the Cob Day’ (apparently) – and reminders for these events will now appear in the calendar panel.

How does Bing figure in this? Well, if you click on said event, you’ll get information on it fired up in… wait for it… yes, Bing search engine. And what web browser will that appear in? Microsoft Edge, of course. Why promote one service, when you can promote two, after all?

Analysis: Why risk the besmirchment?

This is a bit sneaky as it’s far from clear that you’re invoking Bing and Edge when you click something on the calendar flyout out of curiosity. Moreover, this happens despite the Windows 10 preferences you’ve chosen for your default search engine or browser, which again is an unwelcome twist.

This is the kind of behavior that impacts negatively on Microsoft’s reputation and it doesn’t help that the tweak isn’t mentioned in the update notes. We’re only told that the June patch provides a “rich calendar experience” (well, it’s making someone rich, or at least a little richer, possibly – but not you).

The kicker here is that Windows 10 is only four months from being declared a dead operating system, with its life support removed (unless you pay for additional security patches for an extra year). So, why even bother making changes like this when Windows 10 is facing its final curtain? Why take any risks at all that could cause reputational damage?

Well, one thought occurs: maybe Microsoft isn’t convinced that floods of people are going to be leaving Windows 10 when the End of Life deadline rolls around in October 2025. After all, an alarmingly hefty number of diehards are still clinging on to the older operating system. In which case, perhaps Microsoft sees the value and worth in still bugging Windows 10 users for the foreseeable, while they stick around either paying for support, or risking their unpatched PC being compromised while refusing (or being unable) to upgrade to Windows 11.

Oh well. At least we’ve got the seconds back on the calendar clock display, hurray.

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• You can now create Sora AI videos in the Bing app on mobile
• You get 10 credits, but can earn more by searching with Bing
• Videos are portrait and five seconds long with more formats coming soon

Remember Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to take on the mighty Google in search? I’ve got to admit, I’d completely forgotten about it until Microsoft’s latest trick to make it relevant again caught me off guard: It has added Sora AI video creation to the Bing app on iOS and Android, for free!

Since you would normally need to be a ChatGPT Plus subscriber (which costs $20 a month) to get access to Sora, that’s a pretty sweet deal.

However, a look at the small print shows there are some restrictions. You get 10 ‘fast creations’ credits to start with, and each time you create a video with Bing Video Creator you gobble up a credit.

Using 'fast credits' your video will be created in just a few minutes. Once you’re out of fast credits you switch to Standard speed. Standard means that it will take Bing “approximately several hours per video” to generate anything.

Intriguingly, the 'fast credits' don't auto-renew each month, but instead you can earn more of them by searching using the Bing search engine.

Microsoft has produced a video to show you how Bing Video Creator works:

Using Bing Video Creator

To use Bing Video Creator you have to be using the Bing app on mobile, available on the App Store and Google Play Store.

Once it's running just tap the apps icon at the bottom right of the Bing screen to access all the apps it contains. Next, tap on Video Creator.

You can then type in a prompt for your video. Obviously, the more descriptive you are with your prompts the better the video will be, but to test it out I tried something very simple: “A tiger prowling through the jungle” and hit the Create button.

Just a couple of minutes later, I had my five second AI video. And it had only used up one of my 'fast creations' credits.

I could share my video using all the usual methods on my iPhone, and the video file it produced was only 7MB in size. Videos created in Bing Video Creator are five seconds long and can be created in 9:16 format with 16:9 format “coming soon”.

Here it is:

Unlike Google’s recently released Veo 3 AI video creator, you can’t lip-sync voices in Sora videos, so you can’t make videos of people saying things, although it surely can’t be long before OpenAI add this feature to Sora. There also didn’t seem to be any way of adding sound to the video at all in Bing.

We all know that Microsoft has had a long-standing alliance with OpenAI which has meant that Copilot is powered by the ChatGPT search engine. This has sometimes meant that you can access premium features that you’d normally have to pay for via a ChatGPT.

The addition of Bing Video Creator is another welcome advantage of this deal, even if it's currently only available on mobile, however, Microsoft says that a desktop version is coming soon.

Earning more credits

The most interesting part of the new tool is how you earn 'fast creation' credits. To gain more you can redeem 100 Microsoft Rewards points for a single credit. You can earn these reward points by searching using Bing on desktop or mobile, browsing using the Edge browser or gaming using the Xbox console, provided you are logged in with your Microsoft account.

For example, you can earn five points by searching just once using Bing on either mobile or PC desktop. So, the more you search with Bing, the more Sora videos you can create.

Offering Sora video credits for searching in Bing is a clever tactic from Microsoft, and who knows, it might just bring Bing back into the spotlight again?

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Blocking YouTube ads is one of the most requested features associated with the world’s most popular video viewing platform (and incidentally, the world’s second-biggest search engine).

So you want to watch YouTube without any ads but don’t want to try any of these annoying plugins advertised on social networks and in your social feed? Then I’ve got a solution for you.

Microsoft’s web browser, Edge, can be used to bypass pesky YouTube adverts on desktop and on mobile. I know it because I have used it extensively over the past few weeks.

I don’t know how long that will last though if suddenly its popularity picks up. It is a big loophole that Google may close at any moment. So caveat emptor. Here’s what you need to know:

1. Edge’s default search is Bing and Bing's default video source is YouTube

You will need to download and install Edge on your device: it is already present on all recent Windows device and also available for Linux, MacOS, Android and iOS.

Just like Google, Microsoft prioritizes YouTube as its main video source.

Looking for any terms straight from Edge’s address bar and appending the word “video” will bring up related video entries in your Bing search results.

Clicking on any one of them will open the video in a new window on desktop (but not on mobile) and autoplay it. Note that clicking on the actual YouTube link will open YouTube rather than Bing’s own video player.

2. A barebone viewing experience

Bing Videos - when playing Youtube videos - offers a far more simplified viewing experience compared to Youtube. Think of it as YouTube Lite.

There’s no comments and no ability to interact with the video (e.g share, likes etc). It retains YouTube’s core features though: volume, close caption, ability to change resolution, play on TV (which reverts to Youtube and and play in fullscreen).

I like the fact that it has a big timeline of key moments in the video but I’ll give it a thumbs down for the tiny, unlabelled Save button (which saves the video in your Edge browser collection).

3. You can get paid for viewing

You will get paid in points if you choose to. You can exchange these points for gift cards and then use these gift cards to buy tens of thousands of products.

In the UK, you can spend your points on digital gift cards from Amazon, Microsoft, Roblox, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, John Lewis, TK Maxx, Starbucks, Argos, Uber and many, many more.

With Microsoft Rewards, you can earn three points for every Bing search and earn up to 150 points per day (up to 90 on your PC and 60 on your phone).

That’s good enough for 50 different videos but you will need to be signed in as well. In the UK and at the time of writing, 12,400 points earn you £10, that’s 83 days maxing out your search quota (and playing up to 10,000 videos).

So that amounts to 0.1p (or fractionally more in USD) per video played. And like in YouTube, it will autoplay to the next file in the “related videos” section from the right-hand side.

4. You can create your own playlist (sort of)

There’s no playlist feature by default. However, you can save any video in Edge’s Collection feature but you can’t get them to autoplay, which is a shame.

Clicking on the save button will automatically save the video to the last Collections group selected. Also any videos opened from Collection will play in theater mode.

5. No screens of on mobile (sadly)

You won’t be able to play YouTube videos via Bing on Edge mobile with your smartphone screen off or if played in the background. It stops just like the free version.

That would have been perfect; putting your phone in power-saving mode and your screen on minimal brightness could help save some power.

More about how to extend your smartphone battery life.

6. You can’t install Edge on streaming devices

Edge is not available on any major streaming devices like Amazon Firestick or Roku but you can still stream it from a mobile if your smartphone is Miracast compatible (most recent Android ones are). You may be able to download and run it as an APK but I haven't tried it.

If you still want to use YouTube app on your smartphone or streaming device (or the site on your desktop) to enjoy the full functionality of the video playing platform, then one controversial option would be to use ad blockers (we’ve got a list of the best adblockers here).

• Microsoft is modifying Windows 11 search in the EEA to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act
• Start Menu search now separates local on-device results from web results, which remain powered by Bing
• Other DMA-driven changes include uninstalling Edge and disabling Bing search, but only for EEA users

Microsoft is tweaking Windows 11’s search feature in the Start menu for users in the European Economic Area (EEA) to comply with new EU rules (specifically the Digital Markets Act, or DMA). Normally, when you search in the Start menu, Windows 11 shows results from both your computer and the internet (using Microsoft’s search engine, Bing). But now, it looks like Microsoft will make those search results more obviously separate.

MSPowerUser reports that the change can be seen in a new Windows 11 Insider Preview Build, build number 27764. One Windows Insider and X poster @alex290292 shared a screenshot showing this new Start menu user interface (UI) with two sections in the search window; one labelled “Windows” and the other “Web search from Bing” (note that their Windows 11 language is set to German).

Windows 11's search shake-up after a nudge from the EU

This change follows several other updates that give users more control over how they use Windows 11, including the introduction of custom web search providers’ results into Windows Search, and the ability to uninstall Microsoft Edge (the default web browser that comes preinstalled in Windows 11) from their device and disable Bing web search. These changes were also brought in to comply with the DMA, so while the EU isn’t letting up on its regulatory stance, Microsoft is playing ball for now.

The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a set of rules designed to keep big tech companies from using their dominance to box out competition. Since Windows is hugely popular, Microsoft has to play fair and not use it as a way to force people into using its other services, like pushing Bing and Edge instead of letting users choose their own search engine or browser. That’s where the DMA steps in: to make sure companies like Microsoft don’t unfairly steer users toward their own products when they should be offering real choices.

Another intriguing change that we can expect to Windows 11’s Start menu soon is when you right-click on an app pinned there, you’ll see new ‘jump lists’ that pop up. As explained by MSPowerUser, a jump list is a flyout menu that provides quick access to recent files, folders, or tasks associated with an app by right-clicking its icon on the taskbar or Start menu.

Microsoft’s decision to separate Windows 11’s local and web search results might seem like a straightforward tweak, but it also highlights the company’s reluctance to make a simple change like this without being given a reason to by an external influence (in this case the EU). Integrating Bing tightly into Windows 11’s search features seems motivated by Microsoft’s business ambitions, namely wanting to direct more user traffic to Bing in the hopes of increasing user engagement with Microsoft services and getting higher ad revenues. Closing the gap with market leader Google is also likely an ambition of Microsoft.

Separating Windows 11’s search results may be effectively disrupting these aims a little, but it’s in the interest of supporting greater user choice.

A welcome tidy-up (but only in Europe)

The fact that this update only applies to the EEA suggests that Microsoft isn’t keen on rolling it out more widely, likely because it would reduce the passive traffic Bing receives from Windows 11 users worldwide. From a user perspective, this change is a welcome improvement, particularly for those frustrated with how cluttered and inconsistent the Start menu search can feel.

The primary concern with the current setup is that it combines local and web results in a way that might not always serve users’ best interests.

Searching for a file or app on your PC, only to be met with a mix of content that's actually on your device and web suggestions (which often feel irrelevant) can be more distracting than helpful. By giving users a clearer distinction between on-device and online results, this change ensures that Windows Search serves its intended purpose, in particular finding what you need on your PC first, rather than acting as a disguised gateway to Microsoft’s services.

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• Microsoft has been accused of using an underhand trick to drive Bing traffic
• In certain situations, searching for ‘Google’ in Bing will produce a results page that looks a lot like Google's home page
• Critics argue this might lead to people searching via Bing rather than Google without knowing

Microsoft’s been accused of using underhand tricks that push the use of the Bing search engine at the expense of Google – and the outcry has prompted a senior Google employee to speak out.

According to Windows Latest, people who searched for Google using either Edge or Chrome web browsers with Bing set as their default search engine would get a results page that looked a lot like Google's home page, rather than the usual Bing results page.

When Bing returns the search results, Microsoft has apparently made a change so that the Bing search bar – normally found at the top of the list of results – has had an image added to it, rather like a Google doodle.

This has led to some on the internet accusing Microsoft of making it look like the Google home page has loaded, and even suggesting that the web page is loaded in such a way that the ‘Microsoft Bing’ logo and bar at the very top are hidden away.

This could make users go ahead and run a search, using the Bing bar, while thinking they are using Google.

The backlash has been swift and vocal, with even a senior employee at Google weighing in.

This is a major intervention – and a surprising one at that. Parisa Tabriz is VP of Chrome at Google, and she's making some bold accusations, even going as far as to tag Microsoft. We don't often see such senior employees getting involved in accusations that (as far as we can tell) are far from substantiated.

The fact that Tabriz has commented on this, likely with senior Google staff knowing about it, suggests that Google is not happy about this. However, we shouldn't rush to judgment, and Google should be careful about amplifying accusations against a major rival (and one that Google frequently collaborates with).

Analysis: An unedifying spat

Neither Google nor Microsoft come out of this particularly well. There's no denying that the results page for 'Google' using Bing does look a lot like Google's home page (we've tried it here ourselves), and the usual Bing branding is indeed obscured as the page loads slightly scrolled down. Perhaps the most damning aspect is that this only happens when you search for 'Google'. Other searches (we tried 'hats') gives you the default Bing page.

Microsoft's past attempts to get people to use its services means many people are reluctant to give it the benefit of the doubt – but regardless of your opinion of the company, we have to bear in mind that there's no evidence that this is a deliberate ploy to trick users into using Bing over Google.

This makes Tabriz's comment all the more risky, especially as due to her position in the company, many people might assume her comments reflect the views of Google – and that opens it up to accusations of hypocrisy.

Google's rise to the top of the search engine and browser markets has led to accusations of limiting choice for users with tactics that some describe as unfair.

So, while Microsoft's motivations should definitely be interrogated, Google should also be careful about throwing too many stones from its own glass house. We've reached out to both Microsoft and Google for their responses to these accusations and we'll update this story when we hear back.

As for users who just want to search the internet in peace – this is a reminder that like most things you do on the internet, you should always make sure you're using the website or service that you trust by double-checking before you enter in any information.

Via 9 to 5 Google

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• Microsoft claims 10 billion generative AI chats happened within Edge borwser during 2024
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Microsoft has boldly suggested its Edge browser has been central to the AI experience for users across the world over the last 12 months.

In a blog post, the company's General Manager for Product Management and Growth at Microsoft Edge, Search and Mobile, Roger Capriotti, revealed users accessed Copilot within the Edge browser window to engage in over 10 billion generative AI chats in 2024.

Edge has also, apparently, proven instrumental in other areas, like improving accessibility with built-in translation and supporting the world of ecommerce.

Microsoft gives us Edge unwrapped: 2024

An estimated 38 trillion characters were translated using Edge’s auto-translate function in 2024, with built-in shopping features saving shoppers $400 per year on average. Furthermore, 800 million articles and stories were consumed on MSN, with 46 million messages and files shared with Drop.

Capriotti also drew attention to the browser’s performance enhancements, quantifying their usefulness by stating seven trillion megabytes of PC memory were saved by using sleeping tabs.

Security features also got a major mention for the role in preventing over 1.4 billion phishing, malware, and scam attacks on Edge and over 1.8 trillion trackers on the Edge mobile app.

However despite all this success, Edge still lags behind in the global browser market. Google Chrome accounts for two in three (67%) desktop browser sessions (via the December 2024 Statcounter figures), with Edge in a very distant second place (13%). Across all platforms, including smartphones and tablets, Edge resides in third place with a tiny 5% market share, second to Safari (17%).

The update also notes Bing reached over 140 million daily active users, however it, too, lags behind competition. Google, with a 90% market share, leads the way, with Bing taking just a 4% slice.

Looking ahead, Microsoft is hoping injecting artificial intelligence into its browser to improve its usefulness could be one way to help it boost takeup.

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• Bing Wallpaper app has just arrived on the Microsoft Store
• The VP of Bing noted that it's free, unlike some rival wallpaper apps
• Digging into the app suggests it stealthily gets up to all manner of nasty tricks

Microsoft has made its Bing Wallpaper app available on the Microsoft Store for Windows 11 users, but has seemingly opened up a can of controversy when doing so.

Windows Latest spotted the release of the app on the Microsoft Store, and in some ways, it’s rather odd that we didn’t see the software arrive here before now, considering Bing Wallpaper has been around since 2020 (as a download direct from the Microsoft website).

The release was announced by Michael Schechter, VP of Bing at Microsoft, who included a swipe at other wallpaper apps which charge for their services, pointing out that Bing Wallpaper is free.

If you’re not familiar with the application, it’s a simple enough affair that automatically sets your Windows wallpaper to the daily Bing image (and some of these pics are really impressive, and provided in 4K too).

While the app is certainly free, there’s an apparent hidden cost, as some people have pointed out on X and other online forums.

Windows Latest highlights a complaint from Rafael Rivera, a developer and Microsoft MVP, who observes that the wallpaper app also installs “Bing Visual Search and has code to peruse and decrypt your Edge and Chrome cookies.”

Rivera then adds that applies to Firefox cookies, as well, before providing a list of extensions for IT admins to block in order to curtail said activity.

Rivera also provides an example of one of the nasty tricks the Bing Wallpaper app can get up to, and as you can see in the post from X below, it pushes the Microsoft Bing Search extension for Chrome, for those using Google’s browser. It does this by opening a new tab advertising that extension when you start up Chrome.

Windows Latest also discovered that there’s a ‘BGAUpsell’ process run in the background – BGA stands for ‘Bing Growth Apps’ as Rivera points out on X – and this shows a screen asking users to switch to the Bing search engine in Chrome.

Analysis: Big thumbs-down to the Bing Upsell

While we can’t confirm the info shared here, it’s clearly worrying, and both Rivera and Windows Latest appear to have dug up some concrete details. There’s no response from Microsoft or the Bing team on X to these revelations, and frankly, it seems like the Bing Wallpaper app is best avoided by those who are worried about privacy – and not getting hassled to use Microsoft’s products – on their PC.

As another post on X makes clear in the above thread from Rivera, there’s not really a need to install the wallpaper app anyway, considering that Windows Spotlight deliver the same functionality. (Turn it on in Settings > Personalization > Background > Personalize your background > Windows Spotlight).

Okay, so we’re not sure if this is identical to the Bing Wallpaper app, but if not, the built-in option here sounds close enough. We’d install Bing Wallpaper to try it out and check, but frankly – we don’t want to, reading all this.

Other reports on Reddit indicate that the app wasn't always like this, but was recently changed. A Redditor notes: “It [Bing Wallpaper app] used to be great and never gave popups for Bing, but over the past few months it has become a bit aggressive with recommending Bing and since it is the only Microsoft app I have that I installed on my own, that is the only possible culprit.”

Again, take that assertion with some liberal seasoning – and the rest of this – but there’s some consistency around the chatter here, and we’re definitely not liking the themes being raised around this app.

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As if Microsoft’s Rewards loyalty program couldn’t get any better; it’s offering a chance to win $1,000,000 (USD) if you make a transition from your current search engine to Bing - starting October 8.

It may sound too good to be true but as Windows Central reports, anyone in the United States, United Kingdom, Puerto Rico, Canada, France, and Germany has the chance of becoming a millionaire, just by browsing on Bing and entering the sweepstake for free.

This isn’t the first time Microsoft has done this, with the possibility of earning points just by searching using Bing previously - but now the stakes are much higher, and it hardly requires any effort. You’ll instantly gain five entries when sharing your link with friends once they enter, increasing your chances of winning.

If you aren’t lucky enough to net the jackpot (there can only be one winner), ten more winners will receive $10,000, which isn’t too shabby!

Is this a sign of bigger rewards in the future?

While we’ve seen a plethora of gifts available to win via Microsoft Rewards before, none of them have been at this magnitude - it’s essentially a free lottery ticket, that only needs you to use your internet browser as normal. Of course, the catch is using Bing over Google (which is still behind Google in terms of usage) and waiting to see if you’re lucky enough.

This is a clear attempt by Microsoft to convince users to switch over to Bing, even if it’s only for the time being. Despite the big push for Bing to dethrone Google (especially with ads on Windows 11), the chances of this making a significant impact on the popular search engine are minimal - especially considering Google’s search functionality in comparison to Bing’s.

Will this work in the long run? Probably not, but it's certainly a great opportunity to showcase the benefits of the search engine such as AI searching capabilities (uses Open AI GPT-4 which has conversational capabilities), that could potentially retain users.

If the jump from rewards like Xbox Game Pass subscriptions to a $1 million prize is any indication, then we could be seeing Microsoft Rewards become far more generous in the near future than before. Sure, this might be a sign of desperation from Microsoft, but we’re not complaining.

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Microsoft’s Photos app in Windows 11 is getting a “Visual Search with Bing” feature, which will enable you to search for images similar to whatever pictures you’re viewing.

The updated version of the Photos app also brings improved navigation for your photo gallery, quick access to image editing capabilities, and some tweaks to make Photos a better user experience overall. 

Photos is the default app for viewing and organizing pictures in Windows and this update brings some long-awaited features to it. While you’re looking at a picture and feel a tinge of curiosity about something in it, you can use Visual Search with Bing to perform an instant reverse image search, which will prompt Bing to scour the internet for similar images and any information that might be relevant to the image you’re looking up (similar to Google’s reverse image search). 

A similar feature already exists in the Snipping Tool app, which enables you to do this after you take a screenshot. 

What else is in the pipeline for the Photos app?

As well as the new reverse image search capabilities, smoother gallery navigation will make flicking through pictures easier and you’ll be able to jump straight into image-editing tools from your desktop or File Explorer. 

The enhanced Photos app is currently available via the Windows Insider Program, a special group of Windows users who get early access to Windows features. Regular users hopefully won’t have to wait long, as the majority of features that make it to this preview state are usually rolled out widely later on in future cumulative Windows 11 updates. 

Users of the Photos app in Windows 10 can also now sync their iCloud photos, Apple’s cloud storage for images, a feature that’s been in Windows 11 for some time. This means if you have a Windows PC and an iPhone or iPad, you can easily access your iCloud photos after syncing them in the Photos app on your Windows 10 device. 

I don’t know how many people will find this useful as Google search still currently dominates the search market and offers its own image-searching capabilities, but it’s good to give users more tools and possibilities to interact with their own media. Bing reverse image search has more convincing to do, as most people who have even heard of reverse image search would usually think of Google or TinEye - if at all.  

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In the world of search engines, Google is pretty dominant and, to a degree, rightfully so, as it’s very good at what it does. Whether you type in a basic query or one written in a conversational tone, it usually displays the result you’re after. It’s even good at fixing typos. 

Still, too much dominance can be an issue. Earlier this week, a US Federal Judge declared Google a “monopolist,” and it has continued to behave in that same way to maintain its status. 

One way it’s kept that is the simple fact that Google is the default search engine on countless devices, including Android phones or Chromebooks and the iPhone. For the latter, Google pays a hefty sum to Apple, and even with this ruling, it seems that the Cupertino-based tech giant doesn’t see another option. 

Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services, Eddy Cue, says, “I don’t believe there’s a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us. They offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company.”

Apple users fear not

It’s a strong statement and one that essentially confirms there isn’t much to worry about in terms of Google departing since there isn’t really a strong alternative with enough smarts or even potential functionality.

Interestingly enough, any iPhone – or iPad, or Mac – owner can change the default search engine within Safari. You can even get an alternative browser like Google Chrome, Arc, Firefox, or countless others depending on the OS. 

And now, you don’t need to Google how to do it. You can open Settings on iOS or iPadOS, navigate to Safari, and select ‘Search Engine.” You then select from the list of five options: Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Ecosia. 

So you do have the power to change, but going back to 2023, Eddy Cue, while testifying, stated “there wasn’t a valid alternative” for customers, and Apple does give folks an easy way to change it if they do so.

Given the latest ruling, it seems that Cue’s opinion hasn’t changed and that there isn't much of a chance of the default search engine changing anytime soon. Still, though, if you’d rather ask Bing or ponder on DuckDuckGo, you can always switch from Google … chances are you might switch back. 

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Microsoft has just announced a huge update to Bing that overhauls the search engine to put AI-powered answers first.

This means that when a search query is entered, the results page will pop up with a primary AI-generated answer detailing all the curated sources that have been tapped to get that result. You’ll still get the traditional search results on the Bing search page, but they will be presented to the side of the AI-generated material (in a smaller right-hand panel).

The official Microsoft blog post (flagged up by Windows Central) explains this major overhaul as follows: “This new experience combines the foundation of Bing’s search results with the power of large and small language models (LLMs and SLMs). It understands the search query, reviews millions of sources of information, dynamically matches content, and generates search results in a new AI-generated layout to fulfill the intent of the user’s query more effectively.” 

This change is currently rolling out to a small number of Bing users, but it’ll presumably become more widely available before too long. From what we can tell there’s no obvious way to turn off the AI results if you wanted to do so.

Embrace the future or endure the present? 

This big change isn’t really good news if you’re not interested in AI-powered search, as you’re basically losing two-thirds of your results page to AI, with a relatively small space left behind for traditional search responses. 

In its blog post, Microsoft states that it will continue to evaluate the impact that AI search will have on both websites and readers, which is positive news in that things may not be ‘stuck’ this way if there is room for improvement. We can only wait until the new Bing Generative Search has become more widespread to really see what people think of Microsoft’s new search strategy.

Personally, I don’t want any AI-generated answers on my search page at all, but I acknowledge that there are probably a lot of people who might, like students and researchers want questions answered quickly and with sources already cited.

That said, we’ve seen time and time again that AI is not as reliable and accurate as we think it should be – it can be wrong, or pick up errant information quite easily in some cases. Remember Google Gemini plucking strange answers from Reddit posts and telling people to put rocks on pizza?

I can only hope that traditional (non-AI) search isn’t entirely abandoned, and hopefully Microsoft will offer a workable level of control over whether users want AI search results in Bing, rather than having to ignore half of the results presented.

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If we're being honest with ourselves, none of us like Google News, at least not since a series of design overhauls that made it less inviting, dense, newsy, and useful. So when Google News went down for hours on Friday, the – ahem – news was met with a mixture of frustration and a little relief.

Oh, good, we're freed and maybe free to go elsewhere. I ended up on, of all places, Bing News.

I'm sure you've heard of Bing, Microsoft's search engine that was largely ignored until Microsoft added OpenAI's GPT to it (and later Copilot), which made it the first AI-infused search engine.

Like Google, Bing's search reaches across multiple content categories, including images, video, shopping, maps, and news. I've used various parts of the Bing search platform, with a heavy focus on its newer AI capabilities, but can't say I've ever looked at news. Even after Google's disastrous Google News redesign in 2022, I didn't check out Bing News.

Then Google News went temporarily "poof!" and I needed a news aggregation source. So, I opened Bing on the desktop and selected News. My first reaction was, "Oh, how simple, clean, accessible." 

At the Top of Bing News is a grid of six top stories; each has a large image with the headline below and slightly bleeding into the image above. While headlines from other news sources are not listed in each box, Bing News smartly includes media outlet icons and information about how many other stories on the topic are available. A quick click on one of the "relevant news" links and you get another smartly-designed page with a grid that prioritizes the text headlines, followed by videos and then a list of more news on the topic.

On the Bing News home page below that top stories grid, Bing News jumps into a small grid of "For You" stories (Bing News may think I care a bit too much about politics), and below that a side-scrolling set of "Trending on Bing" news boxes.

It's here Bing News takes a breather, with a clever side-scrolling "Take a break" section that features lighter stories. It's fortunately only one story deep, so it doesn't overwhelm the page. Below that it hops into geolocated local news, which is followed by a long list of "more news" headlines.

Fairly balanced

I think Bing News achieves a good balance here of prioritizing the top news, giving you a slate of tailored news, what other people are reading or discovering in search, a tiny break, and then getting to the meat of the news cycle. This structure is clean and logical.

Where Google News always leaned hard into news categories, Bing News takes a lighter touch (there is a broad category list on the left side) and it may be a better one, since you don't feel that any news is shoehorned into an unnecessary category.

This is a generally more inviting feel than Google News, which often seems to be trying too hard, especially in tailoring perhaps too much of the news to my interests when, in reality, I want news that's important and interesting. I do have my preferences but if I see too much news about only the stuff I care about, I won't learn anything new (and also might miss out on some differing points of view).

Google News is hyper-aware of fake and contested news and cares deeply about expertise and sources. How do I know? Google News insists on showing you "Suggested Sources" and a whole "Fact Check" section. The latter is so poorly designed I often can't tell whether the "Facts" presented are false or not.

Visually, Bing News wins by a mile. I just don't enjoy looking at the pale pastel Google News colors anymore and miss the stark, clear look of 2006 or even the OG Google News. I like the consistency of Bing News and that, in general, it's not trying too hard.

There's no Bing News app and even if you download the Bing app it basically hides Bing News under "Trending." It's in the mobile space that Google News almost outperforms Bing. Almost.

Google News on mobile is full of bizarre repetition and often insists, to my chagrin, on defaulting to "For You" news and I always have to select "Headlines" so I can see less filtered news.

If I have one request for Bing and Microsoft, it's that they bring Bing News to mobile as its own app and essentially replicate the lovely desktop experience. Then I can truly leave Google News behind.

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As Windows 11 users are becoming accustomed to more ads in key places of the operating system, Microsoft is seemingly experimenting with adding yet another advert covertly presented as a recommendation. This time the software giant is trying out having PC Manager suggest that you 'repair' your system by reverting to Microsoft's default search engine, Bing.

PC Manager is a Microsoft utility available in some regions that enables you to get a handle on system storage management and file management, and it can help optimize your PC's performance. Generally speaking, it's considered a pretty good app, but as with a lot of its products, that's not enough for Microsoft - it's also increasingly in the business of turning various products and features into ad vehicles (especially if they’re free!). 

Windows 11 has already seen ads introduced in parts of the interface like File Explorer, the Settings app, and, most recently, the Start menu. That roster is being expanded, as Windows Latest discovered, to include PC Manager, which recently got the addition of a 'Repair Tips' section and a Files Cleanup feature (which can detect duplicate files and more besides).

Looking for potential repairs? Microsoft has a suggestion

The advert was discovered when Windows Latest checked out the new 'Repair Tips' section of the PC Manager app, which suggested that the PC be 'repaired' by switching the default search engine back to Bing (which is the Windows pre-installed default) from Google Search (or whatever other browser is set as default). 

People who use Windows have picked up on Microsoft's persistence when it comes to ads, for example the 'promoted' third-party ads beginning to show up in the Start menu's 'Recommended' section. The suggestion that switching back to Bing is a ‘repair’ is a new low, though, as it’s effectively implying that using another search engine is actually a fault with your PC, in a way. Switching to Bing search is not going to improve your PC’s performance, is it? Hardly.

As Windows Latest reports, the PC Manager app was developed by Microsoft engineers in China, and it’s possible that the company may drop odd manner to push Bing if the software is rolled out more broadly elsewhere - it may come to the US eventually.

Letting Edge, Bing, and PC Manager stand on their own merits

From what we've seen so far, aside from this advertising push that's been witnessed across Windows 11 more broadly, PC Manager looks like a good app to help you better manage your PC's resources and files, and Windows Latest recommends it as a seemingly secure performance-boosting app. This makes sense as it's developed by Microsoft itself, which has an interest in ensuring that its apps are as secure as they can be. 

Microsoft Edge, the default browser pre-installed on Windows machines, and Bing Search aren't bad products by any means - they are solid alternatives to Google's own Chrome and Search. Edge has recently seen a whole host of new useful features like a sidebar, sleeping tabs, and an immersive reader. That said, there are parts of the browser that some people consider 'bloatware' and unnecessary clutter. For example, some folks don't currently see much purpose in using Microsoft's AI assistant, Copilot, which is integrated into Edge. 

Bing Search and Edge have enough of their own merits to be considered viable alternatives to the industry leaders, and I know personally that this kind of repeated prodding doesn't convince me to try them. If anything, it can push people away, and tech companies would do well to remember that what wins people's minds are products that work well. It’s as simple as that - let the product speak for itself, and the user base will grow.

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Windows 11’s Snipping Tool is getting more useful updates in testing – though Microsoft is looking to sneak Bing into the mix here, too, by the looks of things.

The update for Snipping Tool is in the process of rolling out to testers in the Canary and Dev channels, and it comes alongside a minor update for the Paint app too, so let’s get that out of the way first (and we’ll come back to that major Bing change later).

The new version of Paint (v11.2404.42.0) comes with a small but notable tweak. Microsoft has decided its AI feature that knocks up pictures for the user upon request is no long called ‘Cocreator’ but is now ‘Image Creator.’

As for Snipping Tool, with version 11.2404.37.0, Microsoft is introducing the ability to drop emoji into screenshots, which you can move around or resize before planting them in the image.

Also new is functionality that detects QR codes in screenshots, allowing you to instantly follow where the code is linking to.

Finally, Microsoft has added the ability to change the opacity of a shape fill, and the ruler tool has returned.

Remember, this is all just in testing for now, and you can find the full details of the changes in Microsoft’s blog post.

Analysis: Bing search in the mix

Most of these Windows 11 Snipping Tool changes were spotted already, hidden in test builds, so it’s no surprise to see them formally arrive in the app. And speaking of hidden features, there’s another one that’s just been pointed out by leaker PhantomOfEarth on X (formerly Twitter).

As mentioned at the outset, this appears to be Microsoft cramming Bing into yet another of its products by way of a ‘Visual search with Bing’ option. This is functionality that will fire up an image search, with the Bing engine, for the current screenshot. Although we don‘t know how it‘ll work yet, it could present results in-line in the app (in a panel, maybe), or more likely open the search in Edge. (Microsoft will never miss a chance to get Edge open, let‘s face it).

Although in fairness, this feature could be useful to some, others may regard it as cluttering up Snipping Tool‘s menu. At any rate, this isn’t actually in testing – it’s not rolling out yet, anyway, but the leaker suggests it likely will soon.

Regarding the change of name in Paint, Image Creator is a more direct and to the point name for the feature than Cocreator. As well as bringing it in line with Microsoft’s use of this name elsewhere, this could be read as an indication that the AI powers of Paint won’t be expanded any further than image generation. (As Cocreator kind of suggests an assistant with more sweeping powers, perhaps).

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Have you used Bing search lately? There's now a better chance than ever that some small contingent of your coworkers, friends, and family are tapping into the Copilot AI-infused Bing to answer life's most mundane and important questions.

As MSPowerUser notes, during a recent Microsoft earnings call company CEO Satya Nadella announced that Bing Search now has more than 140 million active daily users. If they all lived in the US that would be almost half the population typing in Bing.com into their web browsers to launch a search. It's remarkable progress for the long-struggling search engine that got a fresh infusion of excitement when Microsoft integrated a custom version of ChatGPT into what was originally known as Bing AI over a year ago.

Since then, Microsoft rechristened it as AI Copilot and spread its artificial intelligence-enhanced search and generative AI response goodness across most of Microsoft's core products including Windows 11, Edge, Teams, and Office.

The level of integration is so complete that it can be difficult to separate Bing from Copilot in any meaningful way. If you complete a Bing search, you'll get a column of results below your query and a fast-typing, chatty Copilot on the right offering enhanced insight on your initial search. Compared to Google, which has yet to integrate Google's new Gemini AI into the search experience, Bing search results can feel a little over-stuffed.

Information-wise, Google still does a better job of getting to the point than Bing but I can't say that the results on the former are always superior.

When I searched for "I need the best pool cleaner for a kiddy pool" both search engines front-loaded commerce links for a wide variety of pool cleaners ranging in price from $59 to hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars. Bing followed with best of lists for pool vacuum reviews, but Google put useful instructions on how to use Clorox to clean my kiddie pool.

When I asked how to save my dying orchid, Bing listed a The Spruce article with its instructions at the top. On the left was some commiseration from Copilot and more natural language instructions. Google found the same article but below it listed step-by-step rescue instructions.

Again, deciding which is better may be a matter of taste. But that's the problem, isn't it? If Bing isn't wildly better than Google, why would people switch? And, to be clear, most people have not switched.

This StatCounter Search Engine Global market share chart (above) best illustrates my point. The red line living in the stratosphere is Google. Now, look down until you see the blue line. That's Bing. Yes, it's ticking up compared to Yahoo and Baidu (and, yes, Google is trending ever-so-slightly down), but it's still in the single digits when it comes to market share.

140 million is a lot of people, but if Google handles a reported 8.5 billion queries per day and the average person searches 3-to-4 times a day, that means Google has at least 2.1 billion daily active users. That's a guestimate, obviously, but it also puts Bing's progress in perspective.

Search the meaning of winning

The search engine is headed in the right direction but it has a long way to go before people start talking about "SEO" and "Bing" in the same sentence. What Google does to its search algorithm can change the fortunes of entire industries. Bing does not enjoy that kind of power, at least not yet.

Things could change and they could take a sharp turn if and when Google integrates Gemini into its core search. Some are already frustrated that you have to scroll through what are essentially ads before you get to your core Google search results. How will they feel when Gemini inserts its generative AI answers before that precious result? At least Bing has not put Copilot responses on top of its core results, at least not yet.

I'm happy to celebrate Bing's milestone but no one should be confused about who is still king of Search Mountain and its name does not start with a B.

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Windows 11 (and Windows 10) users who are browsing with Chrome might be confronted by a new pop-up Microsoft is testing that attempts to persuade them to switch to Bing.

Windows Latest picked up on the pop-up which appears in a box bottom-right of the browser window, urging users to try Bing as their default search engine, reminding them that it’s easy to switch back if they don’t like Bing (more on that later). The promotional blurb is pushing the capabilities of Bing AI (which we thought had been officially renamed to Copilot a while back, but never mind) and “free access to ChatGPT-4.”

This is even more intrusive than it first seems, because not only is Microsoft wanting to switch your default search to Bing, but the pop-up is also asking to install the Bing Search for Chrome plugin – as this ‘improves the chat experience’ with Bing AI, you’re told.

Clicking yes to the prompt means your default search is switched to Bing and this Bing plug-in is installed – or you can elect to say no – but there’s another level to the hassle here.

In actual fact, it’s the plug-in that changes your search to Bing here, and when Chrome realizes what has happened, Google’s browser warns you that an extension has changed the default search to Bing.com.

Now, when Chrome informs you of what’s happened, you can click a button to ‘Change it back’ (your default search) to whatever it was before. But, here’s the additional kicker: Microsoft has implemented another pop-up to appear under Chrome’s message urging you not to change it back, and that you should select ‘Keep it’ (the plug-in) to not lose access to Bing AI. Good grief, as Charlie Brown might say…

Windows Latest contacted Microsoft when the site experienced all this, and the company confirmed the pop-up, but explained that it’s currently a test notification.

Microsoft said: “This is a one-time notification giving people the choice to set Bing as their default search engine on Chrome. For those who choose to set Bing as their default search engine on Chrome, when signed in with their MSA they also get more chat turns in Copilot and chat history.”

The software giant added: “We value providing our customers with choice, so there is an option to dismiss the notification.”

Analysis: Bing it on – or rather, don’t

So, wait a minute, Microsoft – you’re actually flagging that “providing our customers with choice” in the form of a ‘no’ option is some kind of laudable initiative here? It’d be interesting to see a pop-up that didn’t provide any choice and just switched to Bing and installed said plug-in, whatever you did. That’d go down well.

Okay, so Microsoft has pushed Bing in similar ways in the past (and Edge for that matter, and other services, of course). And for the sake of balance, we should note that Google promotes its own services too (search, Chrome, and more). But as far as we’re aware, this represents reaching a new level of hassling the Windows user.

You might wonder – how is this happening in Chrome, a Google-owned app, anyway? Windows Latest asserts that it’s not something piped in by a Windows cumulative update (which just happened for March), but rather it’s a server-side change from Microsoft which is filtering through to some users (as a test, as noted).

Windows Latest theorizes that the pop-up could be facilitated by one of a couple of files the tech site dug up which were added to some Windows 11 systems two days ago, apparently. (BCILauncher.EXE or BingChatInstaller.EXE, and those file names certainly make it seem like these have something to do with this promo push from Microsoft).

It’s these more intrusive measures which are consistently giving Microsoft a bad name on the hassling users front. Whether its Bing, Copilot, Edge, OneDrive, or anything else, just leave off these heavy-handed attempts at driving adoption, please, Microsoft.

Even testing them, thanks, is not welcome. You shouldn’t even be remotely considering using these kind of multi-stage pop-ups which exhibit malware-like behavior in attempts to cajole users into installations, and avoid reversing those installs when another app flags up what’s happened.

It’s this kind of stuff that does make us yearn for a good Linux distro in some ways, even if we must admit, it’s an empty threat. There are just too many reasons to stick with Windows for our computing (and gaming) usage, but honestly, the temptation is stronger due to measures like this.

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Github’s code assistant is finally here as part of Copilot Enterprise, with a price tag of $39 per month.

The code assistant will act as a chatbot that can reference a business's internal code repository to provide recommendations on code completion.

Copilot Enterprise consists of all of the usual goodies included in the Business plan, but adds on these developer-centric features aimed at large programming teams.

Business and team specific recommendations

One of the most intriguing features offered by the code assistant chatbot is its ability to reference an organization’s existing knowledge base in order to provide specific recommendations on a per-business case. You can ask it how to do a specific development process and it has the ability to tell you exactly what to do in line with the usual processes of the business.

This is particularly useful considering that many developers tend to move from business to business to expand their skill sets and compensation, and each businesses’ process is unique and takes time to understand. Therefore less time is spent on familiarization, increasing productivity.

While currently not released, a feature is coming soon that will let individual teams further fine tune the Copilot knowledge base so that it can provide recommendations specific to individual teams within a business. 

“We’re abstracting the complexity of generative AI and fine-tuning away from the customer and let them leverage their codebase to generate an optimized model for them that then is used within the Copilot scenarios,” Github CEO Thomas Dohmke said, speaking to TechCrunch.

As for Copilot Enterprise exclusives, integration with the Bing search engine is currently supported (in beta) allowing for more up-to-date recommendations from Copilot on subjects that may have changed since the chatbot was trained.

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Apple won't be forced to open up iMessage to rival messaging services, after the European Commission decided that the app – alongside Microsoft's Bing and Edge –won't be subject to tough new EU regulations. And Google isn't particularly happy about the decision.

Bloomberg (via BGR) reported that the inbound Digital Markets Act (DMA), which comes into play in March 2024, will not affect Apple’s messaging platform, nor Microsoft’s Bing search engine or Edge browser, as none of the services hold enough share in their respective markets.

In short, after a probe which went on for five months, the European Commission has concluded that these digital properties simply aren’t a dominant enough presence to require regulation, and therefore they’re flying under the radar of the DMA.

Unsurprisingly, Apple and Microsoft welcomed the announcement from the European Commission. Ducking the regulation obviously means avoiding headaches around compliance with the DMA, and these apps can carry on as they were with no interference.

But Google, which has been calling on the EU to make Apple's iMessage play fair with Android phones, is less happy with the decision. A Google spokesperson told us that "excluding these popular services from DMA rules means consumers and businesses won’t be offered the breadth of choice that already exists on other, more open platforms".

Apple has previously said that it will support RCS messages from Android phones in 2024, a compromise that seems to have worked in its favor with this European Commission decision. But Google and others clearly wanted EU regulations to go further.

The Coalition for Open Digital Ecosystems (CODE), a group that Google helped to set up with Meta, Qualcomm and several other tech giants, also stated that "today’s surprising decision undermines the objectives of the DMA, as well as its potential to improve choice and contestability for all Europeans."

Analysis: A good decision for consumers?

So, is this a good thing, a bad thing? Perhaps the best place to start is asking: what’s the aim of the DMA itself?

The Digital Markets Act is all about ensuring that digital markets are "fair and open" to all-comers. To do this, it intends to regulate so-called "gatekeepers" or large online platforms, providing stipulations to adhere to, and various dos and don’ts for them. 

A key part of this is ensuring interoperability with the gatekeeper’s own service, free access to data pertaining to the service, and a whole gamut of regulation, frankly – including preventing companies from prohibiting uninstallation of an app.

After this ruling, none of this will apply to iMessage, Edge or Bing. This isn’t really a great surprise in the case of iMessage, to be fair, because while it’s big in the US, most folks use WhatsApp in Europe, and iMessage isn’t actually all that popular (relatively speaking). 

Therefore, iMessage isn't regarded as a gatekeeper, and thus not subject to the regulations. The same is true of Bing and Edge, which are still leagues behind Google and Chrome for market share. Incidentally, if you were wondering, WhatsApp will be regulated under the DMA.

If you think Apple is getting a free pass with the DMA, though, think again. As you may have seen recently, the company is being forced to make some major changes to its mobile operating system. 

iOS 17.4 will show you more prominent options for choosing your default browser and will let you download from alternative app stores (not just Apple’s own ecosystem), for starters – which is all huge, of course.

Similarly, Microsoft has been forced to make changes with Windows 11 for the European market, like the ability to uninstall Edge if you want to be rid of the browser, or to be able to unhook Bing from the operating system’s search bar (and more besides).

So, while these individual apps – iMessage, Bing, and Edge – won’t fall under the regulating hammer of the DMA, Apple and Microsoft’s widely-used operating systems most certainly do.

There’s another specter on the horizon for iMessage, though, and that’s the possibility that this kind of regulation may be passed in the US, where Apple’s messaging app does have a big presence.

Furthermore, there’s already mounting pressure from rival browser makers who aren’t happy about the way Apple has dealt with the DMA here, allowing for the aforementioned greater choice and freedom in iOS, but only in Europe – which means that those browser developers must juggle two different versions of their clients for Apple’s mobiles, not just one.

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The next major update for Windows 11 is expected to arrive at end of February, and what awaits users includes artificial intelligence (AI) tools for organising your desktop, being able to disable Bing in Windows Search (if you’re in the EU), the ability to uninstall Microsoft Edge (again, EU only), Notepad updates, and more. 

This Windows 11 update has been dubbed “Moment 5” and “February 2024 Moment” (the latter being the name that Microsoft uses internally).

While this update will deliver some new features and tweaks, this update is primarily aimed at making Windows 11 compliant with new legislation from the European Union, the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Mozilla recently published a report accusing Microsoft of using “dark patterns” and bad market competition practices with regard to browser choice, so at least in the EU, this situation will slightly improve. 

What Windows 11 users can look forward to and when

Some of the updates that are coming with Moment 5 update include improvements to Windows 365’s Cloud PC integration, built-in accessibility features in Windows 11, an option to remove news from the Widgets Board, and the capability to remove Bing from the Windows Search pane (if you're in the EU). These features are expected to be previewed in late February 2024 or the beginning of March 2024. 

This is all we know about Moment 5 at the moment, according to Windows Central, and we will continue to watch and report new information about the upcoming update as we have it. Going by the internal name given to the update, "February 2024 Moment,” it’s not expected to stretch into March, and Windows Central  suggests that users will be able to install this update as of February 27, 2024. 

You can try out this update out for yourself (if it’s available on the forecasted date) by doing the following: 

1. Go to your PC’s Settings app. 

2. In the left-hand menu, select Windows Update. 

3. In the resulting menu, click on the Check for updates button. 

This will prompt Windows to search for any freshly released available updates. If it finds them, it’ll automatically download and install them on your device. 

EU-phoria for certain Windows 11 users

This update is good news for users in the EU, with them now being able to disable Bing in Windows Search and choose a different search provider in its place, and uninstall preinstalled apps like Microsoft Edge. It’s certainly a win for Windows 11 users in the EU and a cause for envy from the rest of us - they’re getting more choice and they’re gaining more control over their computers.

It’s not just Microsoft that’s being accused of anti-competitive practices. Mozilla and Google also recently called out Apple for not going far enough with its new rules and regulations that have come about as a result of the DMA, and, somewhat similarly to Microsoft, in engaging in poor browser market competition practices. 

Users have been complaining about Microsoft’s persistent and annoying efforts to try and get them to switch to its browser Edge, and at least for EU users, this will now hopefully end - or at least become less aggressive. The rest of us, however, will have to wait and hope for our governments to follow. 

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Microsoft is trying out another feature for Copilot which could prove controversial, allowing for users to turn on personalization for the AI, tailoring its responses based on previous chats.

Windows Latest discovered the feature in Copilot – which, despite being officially renamed to that, is still referred to as Bing Chat in some menus – and has had a play with it.

When the option for personalization (in Settings) is turned on, the AI uses insights gleaned from your chat history to “make conversations unique to you” the feature blurb states. Elsewhere Microsoft mentions that it’s recent conversations which are referred back to, although how far back it goes isn’t made clear.

Windows Latest gives us an example scenario where you have chatted about learning French with Copilot, and then you start a new topic on learning software. Copilot might then suggest apps that help in your quest to learn to speak French.

This feature is only available to some Copilot users, and it seems Microsoft is still testing the concept. According to feedback online, some users have seen the functionality come and go from their Copilot AI.

Windows Latest highlights a further addition into the mix for Copilot, namely a ‘Search on Bing’ option that appears when you hover over a message in the chat. If your query isn’t satisfactorily dealt with by the AI, this allows you to easily fire up a web search as a follow-up.

Analysis: Double-edged sword?

Personalization could be regarded as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, additional context is going to be useful for making the AI come up with material more relevant to your needs. On the other hand, it brings up questions about how far back in the chat history Microsoft combs, and issues related to that data – is any kind of personal profile being built here beyond the limited nature presented (i.e. recent chats only)?

We’d assume not, but this is an idea that’s been floated on online forums (like Reddit) before now, and folks are always going to be paranoid around the privacy of these kinds of features. And that’s not surprising, really, given the amount of data hoovering and profiling big tech companies engage in on a broader level.

Notably, Microsoft has felt the wrath of EU regulations of late, interfering with the software giant’s plans for Copilot considerably, and meaning the AI hasn’t been deployed to European users yet, while legal wrinkles are ironed out. That involves not just work on Copilot, but other changes in Microsoft’s products elsewhere (some of them relatively radical like removing Bing’s hooks from the search box in the Windows 11 taskbar).

Speaking of Bing, the new integrated search option for Copilot is a useful extra, though we don’t expect any option to change the search engine being used will be forthcoming (of course). Bard has a similar built-in ‘Google It’ capability, it should be noted, which has been in that AI since its launch, so Microsoft is playing catch-up here.

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It seems Microsoft is up to its old tricks in trying to push people into using its products, once again, and this time the play is to persuade Edge users to switch their search engine to Bing.

As Windows Central spotted, developer Brad Sams (of Stardock fame) brought our attention to Microsoft’s latest bout of “anti-user behavior” in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

Sams uses the Edge browser, but was prompted to switch to Bing as the default search engine rather than Google, as you can see in the above screenshot.

This is not the first time Microsoft has been promoting Bing in such a manner, alongside driving other services including Edge itself and OneDrive. (Search for a new browser in Edge, for example, and you’ll get a banner telling you there’s no need to download a different web browser, and the various reasons why).

The Bing search engine continues to struggle for market share against the might of Google, with Microsoft’s creation securing only 3.2% of the market as of November 2023, according to Statcounter.

Analysis: Bing headway – or lack of it

Microsoft hoped that Bing Chat, its AI now-renamed Copilot, would help to swell the ranks of Bing search users when it was launched early this year – but as we can see, that hasn’t happened. The Bing search engine had a 3% share at the beginning of 2023 going by Statcounter’s figures, so has notched that up 0.2% over the course of the year – a pretty miniscule uptick.

It’s safe to say, then, that the AI angle has not panned out for Bing search, although Microsoft has now started thinking about what its various products can do for Copilot, rather than what the chatbot can do for those products. (Witness the debut of Copilot in Windows 10, driving user numbers of the AI forward, rather than keeping Copilot as a carrot to drive migration to Windows 11).

At any rate, whatever piece of Microsoft’s vast jigsaw of products and services we’re talking about, we don’t want to see prompts in Edge, or Windows 11, or anywhere else, trying to twist the arms of users to switch to another Microsoft creation.

And fair enough, Google does this kind of thing too, pushing Chrome and its own search – but not as often as Microsoft in our experience. Can we please lay off the various prompts for 2024, Microsoft? Because if anything, throughout 2023 they seem to have become more prevalent again.

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Microsoft has announced that Copilot – the AI chatbot formerly known as Bing Chat – is soon to get half a dozen impressive upgrades.

This batch of improvements should make the Copilot chatbot considerably more powerful in numerous respects (outside of, and inside of Windows 11).

So, first off, let’s break down the upgrades themselves (listed in a Microsoft blog post) before getting into a discussion of what difference they’re likely to make.

Firstly, and most importantly, Copilot is getting a new brain, or we should say an upgraded brain in the form of GPT-4 Turbo. That’s the latest model of GPT from OpenAI which makes various advances in terms of being generally better and more accurate.

Another beefy upgrade is an updated engine for Dall-E 3, the chatbot’s image creation feature, which produces higher quality results that are more closely aligned with what’s requested by the user. This is actually in Copilot right now.

Thirdly, Microsoft promises that Copilot will do better with image searches, returning better results when you sling a picture at the AI in order to learn more about it.

Another addition is Deep Search which uses GPT-4 to “deliver optimized search results for complex topics” as Microsoft puts it. What this means is that if you have a query for Copilot, it can produce a more in-depth search request to produce better results. Furthermore, if the terms of your query are vague and could potentially relate to multiple topics, Deep Search will follow up on what those topics might be and offer suggestions to allow you to refine the query.

The fifth upgrade Microsoft has planned is Code Interpreter, which as the name suggests will help perform complex tasks including coding, data analysis and so forth. That’s not something the average user will benefit from, but there are those who will, of course.

Finally, Copilot in Microsoft’s Edge browser has a rewrite feature (for inline text composition) coming soon. This allows you to select text on a website and get the AI to rewrite it for you.

Analysis: Something for Google to worry about

There are some really useful changes inbound here. Getting GPT-4 Turbo is an upgrade (from GPT-4) that a lot of Copilot users have been clamoring for, and Microsoft tells us that it’s now being tested with select users. (We previously heard it still had a few kinks to iron out, so presumably that’s what’s currently going on).

GPT-4 Turbo will be rolling out in the “coming weeks” so it should be here soon enough, with any luck, and you’ll be able to see the difference it makes for you in terms of a greater level of accuracy for the chatbot when responding to your queries.

It’s great to see Dall-E 3 getting an upgrade, too, as it’s already an excellent image creation engine, frankly. (Recall the rush to use the feature when it was first launched, due to the impressive results being shared online).

The search query improvements, both the Deep Search capabilities and refined image searching, will also combine with the above upgrades to make Copilot a whole lot better across multiple fronts. (Although we do worry somewhat about the potential for abuse with that inline rewrite feature for Edge).

All of this forward momentum for Copilot comes as we just heard news of Google delaying its advances on the AI front, pushing some major launches back to the start of 2024. Microsoft isn’t hanging around when it comes to Copilot, that’s for sure, and Google has to balance keeping up, without pushing so hard that mistakes are made.

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Bing AI, which Microsoft recently renamed from Bing Chat to Copilot – yes, even the web-based version is now officially called Copilot, just to confuse everyone a bit more – should get GPT-4 Turbo soon enough, but there are still issues to resolve around the implementation.

Currently, Bing AI runs GPT-4, but GPT-4 Turbo will allow for various benefits including more accurate responses to queries and other important advancements.

We found out more about how progress was coming with the move to GPT-4 Turbo thanks to an exchange on X (formerly Twitter) between a Bing AI user and Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services.

As MS Power User spotted, Ricardo, a denizen of X, noted that they just got access to Bing’s redesigned layout and plug-ins, and asked: “Does Bing now use GPT-4 Turbo?”

As you can see in the below tweet, Parakhin responded to say that GPT-4 Turbo is not yet working in Copilot, as a few kinks still need to be ironed out.

Of course, as well as Copilot on the web (formerly Bing Chat), this enhancement will also come to Copilot in Windows 11, too (which is essentially Bing AI – just with bells and whistles added in terms of controls for Windows and manipulating settings).

Analysis: Turbo mode

We’re taking the comment that a ‘few’ kinks are still to be resolved as a suggestion that much of the work around implementing GPT-4 Turbo has been carried out. Meaning that GPT-4 Turbo could soon arrive in Copilot, or we can certainly keep our fingers crossed that this is the case.

Expect it to bring in more accurate and relevant responses to queries as noted, and it’ll be faster too (as the name suggests). As Microsoft observes, it “has the latest training data with knowledge up to April 2023” – though it’s still in preview. OpenAI only announced GPT-4 Turbo earlier this month, and said that it’s also going to be cheaper to run (for developers paying for GPT-4, that is).

In theory, it should represent a sizeable step forward for Bing AI, and that’s something to look forward to hopefully in the near future.

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Bing, Microsoft's search engine, has been powered up using AI.

Windows Central noticed that Microsoft penned a blog post about the generative AI captions which have been introduced to Bing search.

Normally, when you search for something on Bing, Microsoft’s engine returns results accompanied by a small snippet of text pulled from the page based on relevant key words.

Generative AI captions are different in that they offer a more context-based summary tailored to your search query.

Microsoft explains: “By analyzing a search query, [generative AI] extracts the most pertinent insights from web pages, and skillfully transforms them into highly relevant and easily digestible snippets.”

Every search query will prompt Bing to return a different snippet with the result, so even searching on the same topic, but with changed wording for the query, will mean generative AI (if it’s involved, of course) returning a different summary.

Analysis: A revolution in web search?

For those wary of having their website dealt with in this way, Microsoft further notes that while the generative AI-powered captions “may not mirror the exact wording on the webpage,” Bing employs a whole load of signals to ensure a precise and high-quality summary.

Those who remain unconvinced can opt their website out of generative AI captions if they wish.

Microsoft believes this initiative will “revolutionize the way people explore the web,” so the company is talking a pretty big game on this one.

It’s still early stages for the feature, of course, and a lot will depend on whether that promise of high-quality summaries is consistently realized.

Google isn’t standing still in this area, mind you, and already instigated its own program bringing generative AI to search, highlighting the key points of a web page in a similar vein (and more besides). This has been in testing throughout this year (since May), with it being rolled out much more broadly earlier this month.

AI is pretty much creeping into every area of computing, of course, and web searches will doubtless prove to be a rich avenue to explore.

Thus far, the addition of the Bing chatbot hasn’t helped drive traffic to Bing search, as Microsoft hoped – but perhaps generative AI will have more success in this respect. It’s a hugely uphill struggle against the might of Google, though, which has effectively become a verb meaning to search the web.

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Microsoft is giving users more control over what’s installed with Windows 11, and how its own services are embedded in the OS – but the catch is this is just happening in Europe (specifically the European Economic Area or EEA).

Windows Central stumbled across a blog post from Microsoft describing the changes being made, and noting that many of these are to comply with the Digital Markets Act in the EEA.

The new approach means Windows 11 users in the EEA can uninstall more default apps including Microsoft’s Edge browser.

Furthermore, it’s possible to banish Bing results from the Windows search box in the taskbar. These are the web search results that pop up, whatever you’re looking for, and then fire up Bing in Edge if clicked.

On top of that, with the Widgets panel, Microsoft is allowing for the news and adverts feed to be switched off, so the board will purely play host to widgets (imagine that – and you’ll have to imagine it, sadly, outside of the EEA).

European users will also be asked if they want to sync up their Microsoft account with Windows 11 (rather than it just happening by default).

And finally, in the EEA if you click a browser link, it will open in your default browser – meaning that Microsoft’s own software will no longer insist on firing up Edge regardless of your preference (which makes sense, as if you’ve uninstalled Edge, that could get tricky).

When will all this happen? The changes are rolling out in preview now for Windows 11, and will follow for Windows 10 too, with the aim being to achieve compliance with the European regulations and deploy to consumers by March 6, 2024.

Analysis: Choices for everyone? Not likely

Clearly these are customization options which many Windows 11 users would love to benefit from. Especially the ability to have the widgets board with no distractions, just pure widgets, as well as having links open in your default browser always, without fail, and unhooking Bing from the taskbar search box.

Let’s face it, in the latter case, when you’re quickly searching for a Windows setting, you don’t want to be spammed with meaningless web search suggestions that try to get you to open up Edge (and Bing.com).

Will these choices – and other perks like the ability to remove the Edge browser – come to other regions outside of the EEA? Well, that seems very unlikely, seeing as Microsoft is having its hand forced here, and it’s about complying with regulations (that aren’t in place elsewhere) rather than genuinely catering to the wants and needs of users. So, a wider expansion of these options seems a forlorn hope, sadly.

Remember that Copilot is not available in the EEA yet, and this is due to regulatory issues – so these moves could well be tied up in Microsoft’s overall scheme of things for deploying the AI to Windows 11 users in this region.

As Microsoft puts it: “We look forward to continuing to work with the European Commission to finalize our compliance obligations.” And we take that to mean Copilot shouldn’t be too far off for the EEA, with any luck for those who live there.

The one positive for the rest of the world is that at least the streamlining of the default app roster in Windows 11 is happening for everyone. This is something Microsoft has been working on for some time, giving users the ability to remove the likes of the Photos and Camera apps, and the Tips app plus Steps Recorder are to be axed, plus the Maps and Movies & TV clients have been dropped. Thankfully those streamlining efforts count for everyone, and should be an ongoing drive, we reckon.

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Microsoft doubtless hoped that the launch of Bing AI would help attract users to the Bing search site, but that hasn’t happened going by some fresh stats.

Statcounter has just aired some figures on search volume and the bad news (for Microsoft) is that Bing’s share of the search engine market in the US has dropped by half a percentage point.

Bing was on 7.4% this time last year, but is now on 6.9%, whereas Google has notched up from 86.7% in 2022 to 88% now.

Okay, so it’s not a big drop for Bing, but nonetheless, it shows that – at least according to one source – Microsoft’s AI chatbot hasn’t made any difference to its search traffic.

The better news in these stats (spotted by Windows Central) is that Edge is up 1% in the browser market, but it’s only on 5.5% in total, so Google’s Chrome remains just as dominant as its search engine.

Analysis: A reversal of priorities?

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Bing AI not helping Microsoft’s search traffic efforts. A few months ago, Statcounter’s global stats also showed that Bing.com traffic fell slightly (to be fair, by 0.04% which is margin of error stuff, so effectively it stayed the same). The global stats for October 2023 also show a slight drop year-on-year.

The broad conclusion, then, is that Bing AI is not managing to drive any meaningful level of traffic to Microsoft’s search engine.

Does Microsoft really care overly about that, though? Maybe not so much now we’d suggest.

While the initial aim with Bing AI (or a big part of it) was to boost the attractiveness of Bing.com, since the launch of the chatbot, the AI explosion has been so pronounced – and the bandwagon so attention-grabbing – that artificial intelligence has become overrulingly important itself.

By which we mean that Bing search considerations, or persuading folks to adopt Windows 11 to get the Copilot AI (essentially integrated Bing with bells and whistles, though not many of the latter yet), have now taken a back seat.

If a fresh rumor is to be believed, Microsoft is bringing Copilot to Windows 10 – a surprising move after the software giant said that the older OS was no longer getting any new features (except for very minor tweaks – and the AI assistant most definitely is a major upgrade).

What this shows – if true – is that Microsoft is less worried about encouraging Windows 11 adoption (which has been seriously slow) and using Copilot as a carrot to persuade upgrades, and more concerned about getting all the many folks on Windows 10 using its AI, bolstering the figures for that.

We can believe this might be the case, given that in the bigger picture, AI has become such a huge deal – with everyone getting in on the act, and for example the likes of Nvidia making a ton of profit from its AI-targeted GPUs. Team Green is very keenly focused on those products now, to the extent that we even worry about the future of the best gaming GPUs (the GeForce ones, that is).

It’s likely the end goal is shifting to Microsoft advancing its AI tech across web properties and its desktop OS ecosystem alike, getting people used to Bing or Copilot being their everyday helper – and that being the primary goal.

Rather than leveraging AI to push the company’s other products, Microsoft is now prioritizing the other way round, possibly. Maybe also thinking that if its AI systems gain enough clout, users will follow to other products eventually, anyway.

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Microsoft’s Bing AI may be close to finally getting plug-ins, a feature that has been experimented with before, and will make the chatbot considerably more versatile and powerful (in theory, anyway).

Windows Latest reports that the update to add plug-ins has rolled out to a ‘small’ number of Bing Chat users over the weekend, and the tech site was one of those to get access.

Note that it appears the rollout is only happening for those using the Canary version of Microsoft’s Edge browser (and Windows Latest only got the feature in that preview release, not in the finished version of Edge).

We’re told that the AI currently offers five plug-ins to testers and you can pick any three of those to use in a session. If you want to change plug-ins, you’ll need to start a new Bing Chat session.

Windows Latest carried out some testing with a couple of those plug-ins, and the results seemed useful, with the OpenTable add-on providing some restaurant recommendations in a query.

Other plug-ins available in testing include Kayak, Klarna, and a shopping add-on for buying suggestions – we’ve already got you covered there, of course, especially for the imminent Black Friday sale – but it may be the case that different plug-ins appear for different users.

Analysis: Faster and better

Eventually, of course, there will be a whole load of plug-ins for the Bing AI, or that’s certainly Microsoft’s plan, although they’ll doubtless be rolled out in stages over time. One of those will be the much-awaited ‘no search’ function that was switched to be implemented via a plug-in not so long ago. (This allows the user to specify that the AI can’t use search content scraped from the web in its responses).

We’ve seen plug-ins in a limited test rollout before (in August), but they were pulled, so this is effectively a return of the feature – hinting it might arrive sooner rather than later.

Fingers crossed, and the good news is that Windows Latest observes that these new plug-ins seem to be more responsive and work better than the old efforts (performance-related concerns are likely one of the reasons that the test plug-ins got pulled earlier this year).

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You may have noticed that Bing AI got a big upgrade for its image creation tool last week (among other recent improvements), but it appears that after having taken this sizeable step forward, Microsoft has now taken a step back.

In case you missed it, Bing’s image creation system was upgraded to a whole new version – Dall-E 3 – which is much more powerful. So much so that Microsoft noted the supercharged Dall-E 3 was generating a lot of interest and traffic, and so might be sluggish initially.

There’s another issue with Dall-E 3 though, because as Windows Central observed, Microsoft has considerably reined in the tool since its recent revamp.

Now, we were already made aware that the image creation tool would employ a ‘content moderation system’ to stop inappropriate pics being generated, but it seems the censorship imposed is harsher than expected. This might be a reaction to the kind of content Bing AI users have been trying to get the system to create.

As Windows Central points out, there has been a lot of controversy about an image created of Mickey Mouse carrying out the 9/11 attack (unsurprisingly).

The problem, though, is that beyond those kinds of extreme asks, as the article makes clear, some users are finding innocuous image creation requests being denied. Windows Central tried to get the chatbot to make an image of a man breaking a server rack with a sledgehammer, but was told this violated Microsoft’s terms of using Bing AI.

Whereas last week, the article author noted that they could create violent zombie apocalypse scenarios featuring popular characters (that are copyrighted) with Bing AI not raising a complaint.

Analysis: Random censorship

The point is about censorship being an overreaction here, or this seemingly being the case going by reports, we should add. Microsoft left the rules too slack in the initial implementation, it appears, but has gone ahead and tightened things too much now.

What really illustrates this is that Bing AI is even censoring itself, as highlighted by someone on Reddit. Bing Image Creator has a ‘surprise me’ button that generates a random image (the equivalent of Google’s ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button, if you will, that produces a random search). But here’s the kicker – the AI is going ahead, creating an image, and then censoring it immediately.

Well, we suppose that is a surprise, to be fair – and one that would seem to aptly demonstrate that Microsoft’s censorship of the Image Creator has maybe gone too far, limiting its usefulness at least to some extent. As we said at the outset, it’s a case of a step forward, then a quick step back.

Windows Central observes that it was able to replicate this scenario of Bing’s self-censorship, and that it’s not even a rare occurrence – it reportedly happens around a third of the time. It sounds like it’s time for Microsoft to do some more fine-tuning around this area, although in fairness, when new capabilities are rolled out, there are likely to be adjustments applied for some time – so perhaps that work could already be underway.

The danger of Microsoft erring too strongly on the ‘rather safe than sorry’ side of the equation is that this will limit the usefulness of a tool that, after all, is supposed to be about exploring creativity.

We’ve reached out to Microsoft to check what’s going on with Bing AI in this respect, and will update this story if we hear back.

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Look, if Microsoft's own CEO knows it and Apple confirms it by collecting billions each year, it's time to stop fighting and accept that Google won the search engine battle and that nothing, not even AI, will unseat it in our lifetime.

That reality is cause for concern among those who believe in competition, like the US Department of Justice and US District Judge Amit Mehta, who worries that Google is unfairly boxing out competitors like Microsoft and potential new entrants like Apple, which may or may not be building its own search engine.

The harsh reality was admitted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, though, when he took the stand during the DOJ's ongoing Google antitrust trial to complain that Google has an unfair advantage, mostly leveraged by its long-standing, multi-billion dollar partnership with Apple. For a hefty fee, Apple uses Google as the default search engine on nearly 1.5 billion iPhones.

Despite people's long-standing concerns about Google and privacy, Apple has held steadfastly onto this lucrative search relationship. 

It's not that Apple goes gently into the good search fight. Going back at least as far as 2020, there've been reports that Apple was building its own search engine. The latest news is so far from surprising; it's exhausting.

The change is not coming

Of course, Apple is working on smarter, probably AI-based ways to search both on devices and through external sources. Most new reports point out how Apple's Spotlight is essentially the fruits of that effort. While it gets incrementally smarter with every new macOS, iOS, and iPadOS iteration, Spotlight is in no way a Google competitor.

I think everyone knows by now that, perhaps because of the billions Apple makes off Google every year, it shows little interest in actually competing with Google – at least on the search front.

Google's primary search competitor remains Microsoft Bing, in that it's backed by a company that is also spending billions to develop it and maybe carve away at Google's monolithic hold on our search psyche.

Bing's chief innovation is the use of AI (powered by ChatGPT-4) in search results or as part of an integrated chatbot. When Microsoft launched AI-powered Bing Search in February 2023, Nadella was bullish on the transformative nature of AI, especially as it related to search.

“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” Nadella said in a blog post on the release.

Microsoft has since embedded its search AI in everything from Office to Windows 11. You might be introduced to it as CoPilot, but at it's core it's about a much more powerful way to search. 

A chatbot that can guess the correct next word in a conversation is not much use without an ocean of indexed data behind it. That remains the secret sauce of AI-powered Bing Search: it's AI smart and search engine knowledgeable.

Nadella's excitement, however, may have been a little bit of bluster, too.

The quiet part out loud

In the DOJ antitrust trial, Nadella admitted the difficulty of competing with Google when the latter is plugged into the massive Apple iPhone distribution system. According to the Wall Street Journal, Nadella later added that his initial excitement about ChatGPT's potential to help AI unseat Google was an overstatement.

"...That's called exuberance of someone who has like 3% share, that maybe I'll have 3.5% share," said Nadella.

Now let's digest that for a moment. The CEO of a company that's made what I am assuming is a multi-billion dollar and multi-year bet on AI and search already knows that it's a lost cause. I don't disagree that Microsoft is unlikely to break through 5% of the search market any time soon, but I do wonder if AI could be a different kind of accelerant. As it is, many assume Google is worried about ChatGPT and how it might impact its search fortunes, which is why it rushed out and then fixed Bard, its own chatbot.

Nadella was also playing to the audience, really an audience of one: the judge who with a stroke of his pen could force Google to fundamentally change its search business or even break up the parent company Alphabet. Still, I'm not sure what the DOJ can do about Google and Apple's deep partnership. That change would really only come from Apple, if it were to build its own search engine.

What Apple may do

Apple is not doing that. I mean. It is, but not as a standalone product or Google-beater. As I see it, Apple continues to work on search because it benefits your best iPhone, your best Mac, Apple TV, and other produc1ts. Powerful on-board, AI-enhanced search improves how all these products work and their ability to give you the right feature and the right interaction at the right time.

Perhaps someday Apple will feel so confident in its own search that it will be ready to walk away from Google (and give up a few billion each year). But I doubt it's in any rush. The last time Apple rushed to compete head-on with Google, it was Apple Maps, and we know how that turned out. It took years for Apple to turn it into what I consider one of the best mobile wayfinding experiences.

Apple won't make that mistake again and, while we wait, Google search will win...unless the DOJ does something about it.

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Malvertising has made its way to Bing’s chatbot/search engine. Cybersecurity researchers from Malwarebytes recently observed a malicious ad being offered as part of the Chat-GPT, AI-powered answer to a search query. 

Malvertising is a simple practice - hackers try to trick ad networks into displaying ads that look legitimate but are, in fact, malicious. It’s a game of impersonation, as the ads, the sites they’re leading to, and the content being provided there, appear as something they’re not (it’s usually software, streaming services, or cryptocurrency-related tools). 

So far, malvertising was seen on your usual search engines, Google, Bing, etc. despite the companies putting in gargantuan efforts to keep their search results clean, for obvious reasons. However, the emergence of Chat-GPT - especially since its integration into Bing - things have changed. 

New dog, old tricks

Microsoft integrated Chat-GPT into Bing earlier this year, and a few months ago even started monetizing it, practically in the same way other search engines monetized their digital real estate. When a user types in a query, they’d get a result, paired with a few sponsored links (which were clearly stated as sponsored). Bing, in all its AI-powered glory, is no different. 

In this particular instance, when Malwarebytes’ researchers asked Bing for the Advanced IP Scanner tool, they were given a link that ultimately redirected them to “advenced-ip-scanner[.]com” (mind the “e” instead of the “a”), where the victims would download an installer. That installer’s goal was to retrieve the ultimate payload, but it seems to be defunct, as the researchers couldn’t obtain the actual malware. 

“Threat actors continue to leverage search ads to redirect users to malicious sites hosting malware,” the researchers warned. “While Bing Chat is a different search experience, it serves some of the same ads seen via a traditional Bing query.”

Via BleepingComputer 

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OpenAI isn't slowing down with the development of ChatGPT: only a few days after the AI chatbot added support for picture prompts and voice conversations, ChatGPT is now able to once again search the web and return answers that are right up to date.

"ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources," says the OpenAI post on X. "It is no longer limited to data before September 2021."

What that post doesn't mention is that this is the same functionality that ChatGPT briefly had early this year, before it was pulled in July – users were deploying the feature to get around paywalls and access paid-for content for free. As far as we can tell from our testing, OpenAI has now plugged that particular gap.

As before, ChatGPT uses Bing to search the web – no surprise considering how closely Microsoft and OpenAI have been working together in recent years. OpenAI suggests the feature is best used for "tasks that require up-to-date information", like planning a vacation or doing some technical research.

How it works

Right now, you need to be a ChatGPT Plus subscriber to give the bot access to the web, which will set you back $20 / £16 a month. Enterprise users also get the feature right away, with access for everyone else coming "soon" OpenAI says.

Once you've logged into ChatGPT on the web, you need to select the GPT-4 engine, and then pick 'Browse with Bing' from the menu that pops up underneath. You can then start your conversation, and the bot will use information from the web in addition to the data it has access to from its regular training.

We successfully got ChatGPT to tell us when the iPhone 15 launched, and it even linked back to a reputable tech website with more information (though it wasn't TechRadar, sadly). That's one example of how the AI assistant now knows everything that's going on – as long as it's on the web.

The feature is still labeled as being in beta, so expect more refinements and improvements in the future. It's also only as good as Bing's search results, so for anything that the search engine isn't sure on – like tonight's soccer matches in the UK – you might get directed to a relevant website instead of seeing the answers.

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Microsoft has made a big change to its Bing AI for one of the modes of the chatbot’s operation, namely the ‘Precise’ mode.

As users of the AI will be aware, there are three modes that can be selected for the Bing AI: the mentioned Precise setting, as well as Balanced, and Creative.

Precise mode is for those who want shorter and more factual answers in their dealings with the AI, whereas Creative lets the chatbot more off the leash in terms of replies (and Balanced strikes a compromise between these two ends of the freedom spectrum, as it were).

According to Mikhail Parakhin, head of Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft, the company has finished rolling out a “pretty big update” for the Precise mode.

As Parakhin explained on X (formerly Twitter), this doesn’t entail introducing new features for Precise mode, just ensuring that the chatbot gives better answers with this setting.

Analysis: Pushing forward for a better Bing bot

Delivering better answers is, of course, one of the most effective ways Microsoft can improve its Bing AI. As Parakhin observes in the above tweet, the polishing of Precise mode has been noted by some users, even if they’ve framed it as ‘Creative is worse, and Precise is better than it now’, rather than it being a positive step forward for Precise. Which it definitely is, we shouldn’t need to add.

There’s another way that Microsoft is working on making Bing AI’s responses better, and that’s a ‘no search’ parameter. This is something that’s been mentioned in the past which will allow users to cut off the chatbot from the web (search functions) when formulating an answer.

In other words, you’ll be getting a direct answer from the AI (as opposed to one informed by search content derived from the web), and that could be useful in certain situations (like queries about coding, for example). It’ll also mean that responses should be swifter, too, without having to scrape the web for extra bits of data.

So what’s happening with the ‘no search’ function? Apparently, it’s going to be implemented as a plug-in, rather than directly into Bing AI, and is still inbound according to Parakhin (and will happen as part of the general plug-in rollout). Hat tip to Neowin for spotting that one.

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Today at Microsoft's "special event", Yusef Mehdi, the tech company’s head of consumer marketing presented a huge next step in its AI evolution - Copilot. 

It has previously announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, an intelligent assistant that worked across a range of its suite of productivity apps like Word and Excel. This Copilot, as well as the other individual Copilots found in the Windows system and Edge will all simply be known as Copilot.

Now, a more general Copilot is going to help you with almost everything else (that you use Windows or Microsoft products for). This new versatile Copilot will be put into action September 26 to all devices that receive the next Windows 11 update. For desktop, you can get this today and start trying it out for yourself. This means Copilot will be on all kinds of devices - PCs, laptops, and tablets. 

Microsoft is aiming to integrate Copilot into Windows in such a way that feels natural and intuitive to use. It will be a standalone app, as well as function as an assistant in a wide assortment of other Windows apps to assist you with all kinds of tasks. This includes popular programs like Paint, Snipping Tool, Photos, and more where you can copy and paste right into the program and get to work on it right away. 

It will also help you figure out what to do with text, whether it can help revise or summarise it.

One particularly interesting addition to Microsoft’s available apps which Mehdi talked about is Windows Ink Anywhere which will allow you to handwrite a math problem into a text field or take a photo of it, and help you solve it. 

Also, if you connect your phone to your Windows device and give it permission to access your phone, Copilot will use that connection to inform its output.

Copilot and Bing, both with built-in AI

Microsoft’s flagship search engine, Bing, which has seen the integration of ChatGPT tech is also going to work in cooperation with Copilot, for example to help you shop online. You can take a picture and the two tools will help you quickly identify where you can buy it. Bing Image Creator, the AI image generator that anyone can access with a Microsoft account for free, is being upgraded to the DALL-E 3 model. When you ask Bing (and I assume Bing Chat, eventually) a question, the answers you get will be more personalized using your chat history. 

I think Copilot is going to have to prove itself - Microsoft spent a long time focusing on it during its presentation and it's not a physically flashy product, but it promises a lot. If it's as powerful and as useful as Microsoft says, that could be what makes it the next standard that we measure all AI assistants against (like Word was for text editors or Google is for search now). Time will tell.

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Microsoft is working hard towards proving the 'intelligence' part in artificial intelligence, and has just revealed the latest version of its Turing Bletchley series of machine intelligence models, Turing Bletchley v3.

As explained in an official blog post, Turing Bletchley v3 is a multilingual vision-language foundation model, and will be integrated into many existing Microsoft products. If the name of this model sounds scary, don’t worry - let’s break it down. 

The ‘multilingual' part is self-explanatory - the model helps Microsoft products function better in a range of languages, currently standing at more than ninety. The ‘vision-language' part means that the model has image processing and language capabilities simultaneously, which is why this kind of model is known as ‘multimodal’. Finally, the ‘foundation model’ part refers to the conceptual and technical structure of the actual model. 

The first version of this multimodal model was launched in November 2021, and in 2022, Microsoft started testing the latest version - v3. Turing Bletchley v3 is pretty impressive because making a model that can “understand” one type of input (say, text or images) is already a big undertaking. This model combines both text and image processing to, in the case of Bing, improve search results. 

Incorporating neural networks 

The Turing Bletchley v3 model makes use of the concept of neural networks, which is a way of programming a machine that mimics a human brain. These neural networks allow it to make connections in the following manner, as described by Microsoft itself: 

“Given an image and a caption describing the image, some words in the caption are masked. A neural network is then trained to predict the hidden words conditioned on both the image and the text. The task can also be flipped to mask out pixels instead of words.”

The model is trained over and over in this way, not unlike how we learn. The model is also continuously monitored and improved by Microsoft developers. 

Where else the new model is being used

Bing Search isn’t the only product that’s been revamped with Turing Bletchley v3. It’s also being used for content moderation in Microsoft’s Xbox Live game service. The model helps the Xbox moderation team to identify inappropriate and harmful content uploaded by Xbox users to their profiles. 

Content moderation is a massive job scale-wise and often mentally exhausting, so any assistance that helps moderators actually have to see less upsetting content is a big win in my eyes. I can see Turing Bletchley v3 being deployed in content moderation for Bing Search in a similar manner.

This sounds like a significant improvement for Bing Search. The AI-aided heat is on, especially between Microsoft and Google. Recently, Microsoft brought Bing AI to Google Chrome, and now it’s coming for image search. I don’t see how Google doesn’t see this as direct competition in the most direct manner. Google still enjoys the greatest popularity both in terms of browser and search volume, but nothing is set in stone. Your move, Google. 

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New statistics seemingly show that Microsoft’s Bing AI is not helping to drive traffic to its search site.

According to analytics firm Statcounter, Bing.com has actually fallen in terms of its market share for global search engine traffic, so this isn’t even a case of the Bing chatbot only providing small gains – in fact, the search site has gone backward (as highlighted by ZDNet).

At least compared to January 2023, when Bing.com had a share of 3.03% of the search market, and as of July of this year, that has dipped down very slightly to 2.99%.

In fairness to Microsoft, that 2.99% figure does represent a small gain on the 2.76% share Bing.com had in April.

ZDNet also points to another analytics firm, Similarweb, which puts Bing.com’s search share at 3.23% – which is pretty much the same as it was at the start of 2023.

Another analytics outfit, YipitData, also has numbers that apparently show Bing traffic at 95.7 million in February, growing to 99.2 million in April – but then falling to 97.7 million in June (this excludes China, mind you, and mobile devices too).

The overall picture this paints very much looks like Bing.com has remained pretty much flat in terms of how many users are searching the web with the site, then, despite the launch of the Bing AI in February, and subsequent full rollout in May – and that was clearly not Microsoft’s plan.

Analysis: An uphill battle (and a half)

Microsoft is faced with a very steep uphill battle in the search sphere, where Google has been dominant for so long at this point. So, when the Bing chatbot came onto the scene, Microsoft was doubtless thinking this could be the secret weapon it needs to really cut into Google’s big lead.

Even Google was worried about what might happen – just recall the mad rush to launch its rival Bard AI, when Microsoft pushed Bing AI onto the scene (also rather too early, before it was really ready).

As noted, these fresh stats look worrying in terms of the light they cast on Bing AI’s impact, but Microsoft isn’t buying it, and claims the figures here are skewed – and that they fail to account for surfers who go directly to the Bing chatbot’s page.

Microsoft told ZDNet: “Our usage signals show strong growth since February and because of new access points like Bing Chat Enterprise, we’ve experienced one of our biggest growth months on record since we launched our new Bing and Edge experience.”

For their part, the analytics firms told ZDNet that their figures do take direct traffic to Bing Chat into account.

David F. Carr, senior insights manager at Similarweb, commented: “Microsoft says their internal numbers show greater growth than we’re reflecting. It’s possible that we’re missing some of the Bing Chat interactions that use an Edge sidebar or extension, but I don’t know how significant that is in the grand scheme of things.”

While we can’t know the full story here, and we certainly wouldn’t say Microsoft doesn’t have something of a point, the fact that there are three separate sources of third-party data which appear to – roughly – match with each other, is rather telling. And as Carr observes, any missing bits and pieces of data will likely be of questionable significance.

All that said, this will be a very long game for Microsoft, with the idea being that Edge, Bing.com, and Bing AI will all reinforce each other, and ultimately build browser share as well as search share, taking on Chrome in the battle for the best web browser, as well as Google search.

Microsoft is certainly building in features for its chatbot at a rate of knots, and over time, Bing AI could help to build search (and browser) adoption, but at this admittedly relatively early stage, nothing much appears to be happening yet.

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• Bing AI is rolling out to Chrome and Safari

Microsoft is preparing to introduce a new feature to its AI-powered Bing Chat in Microsoft Edge, offering users a quick and easy way to rewrite any text they write on the internet (such as in forms).

As spotted by Leopeva64 on X (formerly known as Twitter), Microsoft’s latest attempt to add OpenAI’s GPT technology into its Bing and Edge products is accessible only to users who have access to the Canary Channel, which gives them a chance to try out experimental new features that need more extended preparation and development time ahead of their introduction to the broader user base. The feature will include options to adjust settings like text length, the tone of the text, and the format. 

Resemblances to Bing AI’s inclusion in SwiftKey 

This feature update follows Microsoft incorporating a similar feature into the SwiftKey keyboard on iOS and Android devices. The feature also allowed users to rewrite text in different styles with Bing AI, and it seems like Microsoft is looking to bring this ability to Microsoft Edge. 

According to Neowin, the SwiftKey version of the feature lets you choose from four tones: professional, casual, enthusiastic, and informal. You can then change the format to suit a paragraph, an email, a blog post, or an ‘idea’. Finally, you can choose a length to your preference: short, medium, and long. Hitting the ‘Rewrite’ button will apply these preferences to your highlighted text and prompt Bing AI to generate a rewrite. 

Bing Chat, now with added functionality and accessibility 

Bing Chat is Microsoft Edge’s AI sidekick that can assist you while browsing, and has seen ongoing updates and improved functionality. 

Another recent feature has been the inclusion of voice input support, offering more options for how users can use Bing Chat. Windows Central speculates that this is because Microsoft wants to get Bing AI in front of more and more users with each update. 

Microsoft is clearly trying to capitalize on the recent surge in interest and hype with AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. I'd wager that it wants to be able to say it offers an operating system and browser that has the best integration of both ChatGPT itself and with generative AI technology in general.

There’s a lot more information to come as Microsoft hasn’t officially announced when this feature will officially debut. Again, if you sign up for the Canary Channel and get early access to the Windows Insider Program, you can try it on your Windows device early. It’s still in a “controlled rollout” phase of its development, however, so access isn’t guaranteed even if you sign up. 

Rephrase your text instantly: how it works 

GIFs posted by Leopeva64 show how you can access the feature by highlighting the text you’d like to reword and clicking Rewrite.

You can also press the Alt + I keys to activate the feature. Once the feature is selected or activated, you’ll see Bing Chat pop up, and the text will be rewritten. Then you’ll be met with a Replace button, which when selected, will swap your text for the generated newly reworded text. 

You’ll always be presented with an Adjust button, and this will give you options to calibrate the rewritten text where you can alter its tone, length, and format. 

Exciting potential 

This feature could be a very effective tool for those who write and edit writing, especially if you’re looking to get some help with creative undertakings. It can reword things to possibly help when you feel stuck in your writing, helping your writing flow, and even help write better to meet specific deadlines. 

One of my concerns, however, is perhaps one of the broader ones; I’m not sure it helps improve individual originality in writing, especially as Bing Chat and OpenAI’s models were trained on online data and existing written works. There's a danger that relying too much on a relatively small pool of writing could lead to a lack of innovation, and could strip the personality from people's writing. The quirks, jokes, and even mistakes that make our messages unique could be eradicated. From a creativity perspective, that could prove to be too high a price to pay.

Microsoft’s Bing chatbot and Bing search on desktop have just got dark mode, a feature that many folks have been keenly awaiting for some time.

Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s CVP, Head of Engineering and Product for Bing, made the announcement on Twitter.

As you can see, dark mode is rolling out over the next few days, so everyone should have it before the weekend.

Indeed, going by feedback to the tweet, many people are already using dark mode when chatting to the Bing AI (or using the Bing search website) on their desktop PC.

If you’re not sure whether you have the ability to turn on dark mode, just go to the Bing site, click the hamburger menu (three horizontal lines, top-right), and go to Appearance, where you’ll find light and dark modes (if available). There’s also an option to automatically use whatever system-wide choice you’ve made for the light or dark theme.

Analysis: Folks are over the dark side of the moon

This has happened earlier than expected, which is always good. Last week, we were told that dark mode was inbound for Bing AI (and search), but we were informed it would be here in a couple of weeks. It only took one week to appear, then, so Microsoft moved a bit faster than anticipated.

As you may recall, Bing AI also got the full rollout of Visual Search last week, so everyone now has that, too. This feature allows you to fling an image at the chatbot, and then get a reply imparting info on the pic (for example, if you have a picture of a historical building, Bing will tell you what – and where – it is).

You can combine that function with the chatbot’s image creation capabilities, too, and ask it to compose a similar image. (Say you’ve got a picture of a wolf in daylight, you could ask Bing to create something just like it, but at night with a full moon).

There’s an increasing amount of neat tricks that Bing AI can perform, though Google is speeding up its progress on Bard, too. The chatbot arms race is in full swing, for sure.

In what could be an effort to catch up to - and maybe even surpass - the internet’s current AI darling ChatGPT, Meta will be open-sourcing its large language model, LLaMA 2, in collaboration with Microsoft.

This makes LLaMA 2 free to use for commercial and research purposes, putting it on the same level as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing.

The announcement was part of Microsoft’s Inspire event, where Microsoft revealed more about the AI tools making an appearance in the Microsoft 365 platform, as well as how much they would cost users. Meta’s explanation of the decision to make LLaMA 2 an open-source tool is to allow businesses, researchers, and developers access to more AI tools. 

Free roam LLaMA 

Rather than hiding the LLM behind a paywall, Meta will allow anyone and everyone to have access to LLaMA 2, thus opening up the door to more potential AI tools being built upon the model - which could be used by the general public.

This move also gives Meta a sense of transparency, something that has been conspicuously missing from some AI development projects; Meta notably also showed surprising restraint with regard to the release (or lack thereof) of its powerful new speech-generation AI, Voicebox.

According to The Verge, Meta will be offering the open-source LLM via Microsoft's Windows and Azure platforms, as well as AWS and Hugging Face. In a statement from the tech giant, the company states that “We believe an open approach is the right one for the development of today’s AI models, especially those in the generative space where the technology is rapidly advancing”. 

Meta seems to be pushing for a community angle with the move, hoping that interested user bases will help stress test and troubleshoot issues with LLaMA 2 quickly and collaboratively. It’s a bold move, and could be the perfect way to counteract Meta’s recent struggles in the AI arena. I can’t wait to see what people make with access to an open-source AI model.

Bing AI is getting a couple of the most-wanted features folks have been badgering Microsoft for, with image search rolling out to everyone imminently, and dark mode shouldn’t be too far behind that.

These nuggets of info come from Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services, who shared the details in a couple of tweets.

We’re told that multimodal/image understanding is rolling out to everyone, meaning the ability to drop an image into the chatbot and have it identify the photo (whatever it may be – a famous building, for example).

Also known as Visual Search (or Bing Vision), Microsoft just penned a blog post on this noting that it’s “rolling out now for consumers on Bing desktop and the mobile app”.

As you can see from Parakhin’s tweet, Visual Search should be fully rolled out as of today, so you should see the feature later on at some point, if you don’t already.

In the replies to the above highlighted Twitter conversation, Parakhin further tweeted about a second piece of functionality for Bing AI that folks have been clamoring for with even greater eagerness than image searching, in some cases.

That would be dark mode, and we’re told that this capability should arrive for Bing AI in a “couple of weeks”, so hopefully pretty soon indeed.

Analysis: Dark times are coming – or maybe already here?

There has been a lot of prodding and poking of Microsoft about providing a dark mode for Bing AI, so it’s great to see this arrive. Interestingly, some users are already reporting that they have dark mode – so perhaps we can expect this very soon for the chatbot, hot on the heels of the full rollout of Visual Search.

Microsoft is making fast progress with its Bing AI, with various nifty bits of functionality coming in at a good pace. Another much-requested feature that’s due to arrive in the near future is a ‘no search’ option that’ll come in handy in certain situations. (This forces an answer direct from the AI, without it scraping data from the web as part of its reply to a query).

Bing AI needs Microsoft to continue driving forward, mind you, as Bard, the rival AI from Google, might have got off to a poor start, but it’s rapidly making up ground with new features now. With Bard set to get extensions brought into the mix soon, there may be some defectors to Google’s AI – something Microsoft will clearly be desperate to avoid.

However, what Microsoft needs to be careful about, of course, is annoying folks by doing its usual badgering tricks in Windows 11 to try and get people to use the AI (and other services for that matter).

Microsoft’s Bing AI is getting a ‘no search’ feature and it’s coming soon, we’re told.

What does this ability do? Much as the name suggests, it instructs the Bing chatbot to answer off its own bat, and not search the web to use that data in the reply to your query.

OnMSFT spotted that Mikhail Parakhin, who is head of Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft, let us know about the incoming functionality on Twitter.

Parakhin has actually mentioned the feature a few times in tweets over the past week, and in the most recent message, said that ‘no search’ is coming “soon” (as you can see above).

We shouldn’t be waiting long, then, to get this capability, and it’ll add to the growing armory of features that Microsoft is building out for Bing AI.

In case you missed it, Bing AI was recently furnished with improved sports knowledge for queries on the big game(s), and a major incoming feature is image recognition (so you can sling a picture at the chatbot, and have the location or building identified, for example). Bing Vision, as it’s called, is due to arrive for all users in the very near future.

Analysis: Another useful option for Bing AI

Another facet of the chatbot Microsoft is working on is to reduce the time it takes Bing AI to respond in the case of certain queries (eliminating so-called latency spikes). Presumably, using ‘no search’ will also have the benefit of speeding up the chatbot’s answers too (as Bing will be doing less in this case). We shall see, but better performance is clearly something Microsoft wants to gun for with the AI.

Why would you want to use a ‘no search’ query in general, though? Well, as the Twitter user who Parakhin replied to makes clear, with some questions, you don’t need Bing to go rifling around the web – and in some cases, scraping data from multiple websites could potentially make an answer less useful. (As another user points out, this affects Bing’s coding abilities detrimentally, for example).

Also, you may just want a quick and streamlined reply, rather than a heap of web references thrown at you. So, while this might be a somewhat niche feature, it’s going to be a very useful one to have for some folks.

Party’s over for ChatGPT Plus subscribers as OpenAI announced it has temporarily disabled the Browse with Bing beta tool from its service. The reason? Apparently, people used the feature to completely bypass paywalls and consume content for free.

Browsing with Bing gave ChatGPT the ability to pull information from recently published sources so it could answer time-sensitive questions. However, it appears the company’s developers underestimated the feature’s capabilities. According to an official help page, “if a user specifically asks for a URL’s full text,” the AI will fulfill the request, including displaying content from paywalled articles. OpenAI stated it’s fixing this issue because it wants “to do right by content owners.” The tool will return someday in the future. Exactly when is unknown at the time of this writing.

What’s also unknown is how the AI was able to bypass paywalls although there is some speculation on the ChatGPT subreddit. One user points out that since “some paywalls are simply pasted over” articles, ChatGPT could simply read the code rendering the text and display the content without a problem. 

Analysis: Avoiding trouble

The response to this announcement has been pretty negative as subscribers flocked to OpenAI’s Community forums to air their grievances.  Some state Browse with Bing was the sole reason they purchased ChatGPT Plus in the first place. One poster says the feature allowed them to read some repositories on GitHub or forum posts that were in another language. Others said that without Browse with Bing, they’re not getting their money’s worth.

As angry as these people are, it’s totally understandable why OpenAI would disable the tool. The company has been hit left, right, and center by multiple lawsuits. Just to give you an idea, you have the lawsuit from the California-based Clarkson Law Firm which alleges “ChatGPT massively violated the copyrights and privacy of countless people when it used data scraped from the internet to train its tech.” There are authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad who claim OpenAI used their books to train the generative AI “without attribution”. And you have Georgia radio host Mark Walters suing the developers for defamation after ChatGPT claimed he embezzled “funds from a non-profit organization.”

What's crazy is all those lawsuits are just from this past month.

Needless to say, OpenAI is currently navigating some rough waters. The last thing the company needs right now is to get hit with yet another lawsuit. Better safe than sorry.

• TechRadar's list of the best ChatGPT extensions for Chrome that everyone should use

Microsoft has provided its regular weekly update on improvements for Bing AI, and there are some impressive strides forward this week.

Neowin spotted that the chatbot now has reduced latency spikes when it comes to certain answers, meaning you won’t be hanging around as long for a reply in these cases.

As Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services, explained on Twitter, this is a result of Bing AI getting a “completely reworked backend for inner monologue”, meaning streamlining the chatbot’s ‘thinking’ process.

A second benefit this week is better handling of sports-related queries, so the range of topics covered in this field is now considerably broader, from the NHL to the FIFA Women’s World Cup.

Finally, there’s a boon for those using Bing AI in Skype, with the ability to generate images (Bing Image Creator) now present within Skype conversations.

Analysis: The importance of being snappy

A snappier Bing AI is vital. Whatever query you throw at the chatbot, you want the response to come with a minimum of hanging around. If you find yourself tapping your foot (or perhaps your finger on the keyboard) while waiting for Bing to get back to you, that’ll be off-putting (and might remind you of live chats, where waits can be frustrating if a help agent is dealing with multiple simultaneous queries).

That responsiveness is a key area for Bing to do well in (that and, of course, the accuracy and usefulness of the response delivered, which is always paramount). So Microsoft is quite right to be honing away on this front.

That said, you can still be subject to waiting times that aren’t the fault of the backend (inner workings of Bing as it processes queries), but are purely due to traffic spikes. When lots of people are using the chatbot, things get more sluggish purely in terms of coping with that volume.

Incidentally, Parakhin elaborated on this in the above Twitter thread, noting that the major peaks of usage occur when folks arrive in work (at three main times – when the US East coast arrives, then when Europe comes to work, then the Far East). That corresponds to 7am, 5pm and 1am PDT, if you’re curious.

Online shopping can be difficult as you’ll have to sift through a ton of information before finding the right product for you. Microsoft aims to take some of that busy work out by introducing some, naturally, AI-powered shopping tools to Bing and Edge.

In total, there are three. First, you have Buying Guides, which as you can probably guess from the name, has Bing write up a literal buying guide telling you what to look for according to a certain category. The AI will show “specifications of multiple, similar items next to each other” on a table so you can easily compare your options without having to jump around a thousand different websites. It’ll even make some suggestions on what you should purchase. 

Microsoft claims Buying Guides are already available on Bing Chat in the United States, however, when we checked, it wasn't as widespread as we had hoped. It was able to create a guide for college supplies like in the video above, but when we asked the AI to make something for gaming headphones, nothing new came up. It was still the old version of Bing where you have to do a lot of the legwork yourself. It appears the update is releasing in waves.

Later on in the year, Microsoft plans on launching the tool internationally. As for Edge, its rendition of Buying Guides is “starting to roll out worldwide”. Be sure to keep an eye out for the patch when it arrives. 

Price tracking

Next is Review Summaries to help you decide between two products you’re interested in. What it does is grab information from reviews to then “briefly summarize what people are saying about it online” through Bing's chatbot. Microsoft states the tool will “provide a quick look at top insights and popular opinions about [a] product”, all in an effort to save you a ton of time. The feature is currently rolling out to all global regions.

The final tool is Price Match, which will monitor an item’s price tag over time and then help you request a retailer match the new number “if it drops.” To make this helpful tool possible, the company partnered up with US retailers that already have price match policies in place. We don’t know the companies honoring the feature apart from Microsoft itself. Interestingly enough, there are plans to have more retailers honor the policy down the line. 

Microsoft says Price Match will soon launch exclusively in the United States. It’s unknown if there are plans to expand this tool internationally. We reached out to Microsoft for more information regarding a global rollout plus if it can tell us the retailers honoring Price Match. We’ll update this story at a later time.

As good as these shopping tools may seem, be sure to stay vigilant when dealing with generative AIs. They can’t totally be trusted as chatbots are “prone to spewing out misinformation”. We're not saying Bing's Buying Guides tool will lie or make up information, but the chance does exist. Developers like OpenAI are working on ways to stop hallucinations from appearing in their tech. However, sometimes, you just can’t beat the human touch.

Use these tools as a backup to guides written by real people. Speaking of which, check out TechRadar’s recently updated list of the best PCs you can buy for 2023.  

Microsoft has bolstered the capabilities of its Bing AI in the Edge browser’s side panel with a couple of welcome new features.

As flagged up by Leopeva64, a regular source of Edge leaks and developments on Twitter, there’s now an export button built into the Bing Chat pane in Microsoft’s browser.

Click it and you get the choice of exporting whatever content you’re currently looking at in the chatbot to a Word document, PDF, or text file.

A second change for Edge spotted by Leopeva64 is that the Bing Chat side panel has a new section entitled ‘Mentioned’ which picks out highlights of things that are, well, mentioned by the chatbot.

As you can see in the example provided in Leopeva64’s tweet, selected movies are shown as images (movie posters, in this case) that you can click on to learn more about the film (with the AI pulling info from Wikipedia in this case).

Analysis: Next up - the huge change for browsers

Clearly, it’s good to have the export feature in the Edge side panel. If you’ve found something particularly interesting, it’s great to have the ability to export it as some kind of document file with a couple of clicks.

Microsoft actually announced that this feature was inbound at the start of May (in one of those many Bing blog posts which are crafted on a weekly basis), so it has taken a little while for it to go live.

The new ‘Mentioned’ box has arrived more out of the blue, but again, it’s a useful addition to have and provides a jumping-off point for deeper exploration into related materials from any particular query.

Bing is steadily being built out in all kinds of directions, then, but in terms of the browser experience, the biggest change is going to be the introduction of the chatbot to browsers outside of Edge. That should be happening soon enough, going by chatter from sources at Microsoft, so you’ll be able to use the Bing AI in Chrome, for example, without having to resort to an unofficial (and clunky) extension.