Microsoft has relaunched Bing Deep Search today after pulling it offline after a failed initial launch. Now the Deep Search link comes with a disclaimer “GPT-powered results takes ~30 secs.” But it does seem to work better than my last test.

Here is a screenshot (see the top right for the Deep Search button):

Last week, Microsoft told us Bing Deep Search will return soon, it took them a bit longer than they expected but today it is back.

Frank Sandtmann tried it out and posted on Mastodon, It seems Microsoft has significantly improved the speed of responses. For my “seo” search, it took about 15 seconds for the results to appear (30 secs for “bing”). A blue bar showed the progress.”

As a reminder, Microsoft pulled the test flights of Deep Search a few weeks ago after its initial test release was pretty poor. I was able to test Bing Deep Search in the wild and, well, it didn’t go well, to say the least.

Earlier this month Mikhail Parakhin from Microsoft said, “It turned out to be more popular than we anticipated,” that Microsoft initially “really though it is more of a research tool,” but clearly many want to try it out beyond researchers. Parakhin said they “need to fix caching” and make Deep Search “more robust.” He said it will be “coming back soon.”

Deep Search uses Bing’s existing web and search index , plus its search ranking system but “enhances them with GPT-4,” the company said. With Deep Search, GPT-4 inputs the search query and then expands that query into a “more comprehensive description of what an ideal set of results should include,” they added. Deep Search aims to bring “back relevant results that often don’t show up in typical search results.” It does this by using “querying techniques” to find pages that might match an “expanded query, rewriting the query on my behalf, and searching for those variations too,” they said.

So maybe you all can try it now, it does seem to be acting a lot better since I last tried it.

Forum discussion at Mastodon.