My basic answer is “they’re trying to rush stuff out the door because the people running bing have no idea what they’re doing” :) given that the things I propose don’t need any new inventions, I’d say they’re good to discuss and coming in the next few years for sure.

And I totally agree that a) a search engine that doesn’t cite its sources is useless, and b) you almost never want to chat with google like it’s a person. So you’re spot on. But the point I was trying to make is that the main use case is in stuff like automated summaries, specialized page rankings, expanding quick informal queries into longer formal-logic ones, etc.