If you’ve been in business for a while, chances are you’ve been using the internet for business for a while, too. Whether you consider yourself a true techie or more technologically averse, you learned your tech basics years ago, and that’s a good thing most of the time.
But could it be time to unlearn some old habits?
I remember learning from my father about a cool new upstart way to search the web: it had a goofy name and a colorful logo and it presented search results in a fun, whimsical way, with pages of results stretching the company name out into something that was unexpected for its time.
I’m talking about Google — turns out, that upstart company has managed to do pretty well for itself.
Of course, the Google search experience of today is just a little different than it was 20-25 years ago. And there’s all sorts of new competition, including new ways to search and interact with results.
Which leads us to our topic this week: if the way you search the internet hasn’t changed much in a decade or two, it’s time to reevaluate how you search. You could be missing out on powerful new tools that could change the way you get work done.
Here are some of the best tools to try.
1. Edge Dual Search
First up is something brand-new — so new it doesn’t exactly have an official name yet.
Microsoft Edge — the newish web browser that comes with Windows and that replaced Internet Explorer — just debuted a new component to its internal search tool.
The browser has its own dedicated search button or icon. It used to be that when you click there and then search for something, you get results from your default search engine (probably Bing if you didn’t change it to something else).
The trouble is, not every search engine “sees” the same stuff or understands your searches in the exact same way. So when you stick to just one search engine, you’re automatically limiting your results.
Microsoft has made a change in Edge so that now you can set both a preferred and an alternate search engine. If you do, then searches within the browser will show results from both of them, side by side!
Seeing the top results from two search engines at once can save you time, broaden your perspective, and show you results you would’ve otherwise missed.
2. Bing AI / Copilot with Bing / Bing Chat
By now you’ve probably heard of generative AI: tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E that can do surprising things (with either the written word or imagery and art) based on text prompts.
Well, there’s a bit of an arms race to incorporate these elements into search at the moment.
Microsoft was the first big player to market, and it got there so fast that apparently the marketing team hadn’t caught up: we hesitate to put the tool’s name here because it has already changed several times.
What is currently called Copilot with Bing is a very impressive natural language chat-based search tool. You can ask it just about any question you can imagine, and it will give you a conversational answer based on information it finds via multiple sources.
This tool is really impressive…some of the time. I asked it for a summary of recent events in the US congress, and the response was fantastic. I did the same for developments in tech news, and the results were barely on topic.
There are questions that a conventional Google search can’t effectively answer (you might have to scroll until you find a relevant result, decide if you can trust it, read the whole thing, and then repeat the process). An AI-powered search might get right to the point or summarize numerous results for you. Just be careful: these search tools make mistakes, but they sound so good doing so that you might not notice!
3. Google Gemini
Formerly Google Bard, Google Gemini is essentially Google’s version of AI-powered conversational search. It’s based on a different underlying architecture and model, and in our testing it’s a few steps behind Copilot — at least for now.
Reach out if you want to learn more productivity tips and tricks that can help your company succeed!