Bob Browning's blog

When I need some information I used to just type into Google and sort out what I want from the results. But a few months ago, got on the Bing Chat pre-release program It is a whole new way of finding information. Google’s version is now out called Bard. Both give excellent results, but my impression is that Bard is better but with a major drawback.

Let’s look at an example. The question I asked was “How many XML Standards are there?” I struggled to find this information just using Google search.

Bing. . The first result was a list of a 16 popular standards and links to web pages with lists on them. Basically no better than the Google search. But then I asked a follow-up “More or less than 1000” and got further

“It is difficult to give an exact number of XML-based standards that have been developed. However, there are hundreds, if not thousands of specific document vocabularies that have been created based on XML to meet the different needs of various industries . I hope this helps!”

It also gave links to five web sites with information on them.

Bard: The first query was remarkably similar to Bing. A list of popular standards, a very vague statement about “many standards”. So I asked again “more or less than 1000”. I got this

“There are less than 1000 XML standards. According to the W3C, there are currently 945 XML standards. This includes all of the standards listed above, as well as many others that are less commonly used.

The number of XML standards has been decreasing in recent years, as many of the older standards have been deprecated or superseded by newer ones. However, there are still a significant number of XML standards in use, and they continue to be an important part of the web and other computing technologies.“

Wow – pay dirt.

However Bard has a major problem. Bing Chat provides a footnote with a list of references to the pages if retrieved the information from. It also suggests some follow-up questions.

Bing just suggests some google searches.

This is a key issue. Some weeks ago I wanted to find the customer services director of a large supermarket. Bing gave me a very nicely worded and apparently authoritative answer, but I followed the links to it’s reference and discovered the information was a decade old, and they no longer have someone with that job title. These tools are very effective in nosing out the information you need, but It is really important to check the results. Bard needs to up it’s game in this area.