ice Canel, Bing’s Fabrice canel on AI and search

Fabrice Canel is a 26 year search veteran from Microsoft, and the principal product manager of Bing’s crawling, indexing and processing team.

Canel gives insights on the current state of artificial Intelligence in search, and the integration of chat features in the new Bing.

Can you share your latest announcements on Bing Chat with Bing?

Fabrice Candel (FC) In February 2023 we will introduce the new AI powered Bing as well as Microsoft Edge – your web copilot. Bing has seen a significant increase in users since then. We recently reached 100 million users per day and 100 millions chats.

The new AI-powered Bing was enabled in Windows, Skype and Edge mobile.

We’ve recently added new ways to interact with AI-powered experiences, extending these capabilities to millions more people around the world.

What are your thoughts on integrating chat experiences with Search?

FC Let’s take a look behind the scenes. I’d like to tell you a bit more about how Bing was created.

Next-generation model. The new Bing runs on a next-generation, large language model that is customized for search. It is faster, more accurate, and has more capabilities. It is capable of synthesising, summarizing and chatting, as well as creating.

Microsoft Prometheus Model. We have created a proprietary method of leveraging the power of our next-generation model.

This collection of capabilities and technologies is called the Prometheus Model. This combination provides Bing users with more targeted, relevant and timely results. It also improves safety.

We thought we could improve the user experience by combining Bing’s power with our breakthrough in large-scale language models.

For more specifics, we have developed a proprietary AI technology called Prometheus. It is a first of its kind AI model that combines Bing’s index, ranking and answer results with the creativity and reasoning abilities of the most advanced models.

Prometheus uses Bing’s power and language models in order to iteratively generate internal queries through Bing Orchestrator. It is designed to give a rich and accurate answer to the user’s query in the context of the conversation. It all happens in milliseconds. This Prometheus generated answer is referred to as the Chat response.

Prometheus relies on the Bing search results to provide the model with relevant, fresh information. This allows it to respond to recent questions while reducing inaccuracies.

Bing Orchestrator data are used to ground the model.

The diagram below shows how Prometheus functions at a high-level.

Prometheus’ final step involves attaching relevant Bing search results, such as stock quotes, weather, sports, and news, to the Chat response. This provides a richer, more engaging experience for the user, which further leverages Bing.

Prometheus can also integrate citations in sentences within the Chat answer. This allows users to easily click on the sources to verify the information.

Bing’s top goal is to send traffic to these sources. It is essential for a healthy ecosystem on the web. We care about this because a healthy web ecosystem will not exist if we do not send traffic to those who create the content. The people who invest in content do so for a good reason. If they are not rewarded, then they will stop.

AI applied to the search algorithm. We have also applied a model of AI to our core Bing ranking engine. This has led to the biggest relevance jump in 20 years.

Even basic search queries become more relevant and accurate with this AI model. The new models have improved our understanding and matching of documents online with user queries.

A new user experience, combining search and chat. By bringing together the browser, search and chat into one experience we reimagined Bing’s customers’ interactions with these three services. This will allow for a new way of interacting with the web.

Prometheus, a pioneering AI-based innovation, is an impressive and innovative user experience. However, we were unsure how to integrate its capabilities in Bing. Two main points of views were expressed:

Neither school of thought had the whole picture, but both were partly correct.

To defend their position, the team that advocates classic search uses navigational queries.

The team that advocates the conversational method would use research-like sessions for searches such as travel or shopping. To illustrate this, I plotted the queries of each team in the graph below.

Then it became apparent that certain queries performed better in the classic or Search mode, while others did better in a Conversational or Chat mode.

Depending on the query, some users might prefer one mode over the other. The ideal Bing product will seamlessly transition between Search mode and Chat mode based on user intent and preferences.

After multiple iterations our design team tackled the challenge. They developed a new UX which unified Search with Chat into a single interface. The users could switch between the two by simply clicking on UX elements or scrolling up and down.

This UX or product innovation is just as important as Prometheus to ensure that people can use the product intuitively to its fullest potential.

In my opinion, UX and SEO are almost always aiming for the same things. What do you think about that?

FC I accept. It’s crucial to know what you want users to do on your website.

Your website should be designed to achieve this. Search engines also consider destination UX. Relevance is just one part of the equation.

It’s also a bad experience if they visit your site with the intention of converting but don’t due to a problem on your site.

Bing’s E-E.A.T standard is similar to Google’s E.E.A.T . It’s more than just the content. We want pages that encourage users to take action to be ranked higher.

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How would Bing recommend that people use Bing Chat output given the possibility of errors?

FC Hard to believe that it’s only been a little over two months since the release of the AI-powered Bing & Edge. In that time, we have learned a great deal and released several improvements.

We are thrilled by the positive feedback cycle and iteration that is driving Bing to improve our models and experience.

We have added the ability to change the chat tone between:

Customers of Bing will see a change in color between purple, green and blue, depending on the option selected. We want Bing users to decide what type of chat behavior best suits their needs. We will continue to fine-tune this experience in response to feedback.

Bing is committed to providing the best results. Bing Chat will not tell you the Earth is flat even though there are many misleading articles online.

We are optimistic about the benefits AI can bring to people, industry, and society.

We are committed to bringing people and technology together in order to responsibly realize AI’s promises. The quality of our answers will improve with feedback and data. Please keep sending in your feedback.

Can people create and publish Bing chat content without editing?

FCWe try to find the best possible content.

Do we have it all figured out? No, we’re not there yet. No one is perfect.

When will we be? Maybe. This is a tool and the problem is more difficult than you think.

Sometimes, there are contradictory answers on reputable websites. It’s sometimes difficult to determine which answer is incorrect.

Recently, I did this exercise to find two different answers for a math geometry question that I was trying to answer for my daughter. I got these answers from two respected experts. I spent between 1 and 2 hours trying to find the correct answer. Even experts can make mistakes.

What is the Bing Chat usage compared to Bing Search for those who have access?

FC We released this only two months ago and Bing users are experiencing it for the very first time. They are learning and discovering. Search, chat, answers and creation are all available in a single experience.

Bing is now used by more than 100 millions people every day. Over 100 million conversations are a result of new scenarios, such as chat.

One-third of the millions who use Bing Preview are new users, which creates a whole range of opportunities for webmasters and publishers. Although this is early data, the signs are promising.

As it’s still early in the SEO game, I recommend sticking with the same SEO strategies as before.

Please keep an eye on our communication, and monitor the data in order to make the necessary adjustments. As the use of Bing increases, it will continue to transform the way people search.

We will begin reporting Bing chat clicks and Impressions in the next few weeks on Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools’ API.

What is the importance of data quality?

FC While the recent advances in LLMs are great, these models must be trained using data from a specific point in time. Bing’s LLMs andcan be used to harness the power of Bing Search.

Bing Chat is a service that contains information published online just seconds before. Bing Chat allows you to see what is happening now.

Today, freshness is important to the younger generation. It was fascinating to watch my children use Bing Chat to find out more about current events. Bing Chat can be used to answer these queries, as it is built on the Bing index.

People spend a great deal of time on things such as celebrity news. People are very interested in what is happening now.

What is IndexNow?

IndexNow FC: allows website owners to easily inform search engines of the most recent changes made on their site.

IndexNow, in its simplest form is a simple Ping that lets search engines know when a URL or its content has been updated, added, or removed. This allows search engines to quickly reflect the change in their results.

It’s interesting that you asked this question and spoke about IndexNow within the context of Bing Chat, which leverages best-in class AI models.

AI can be a great tool to help you find the best online content and see what has changed on a site, but we cannot tell with 100% accuracy if your website contains new, modified, or deleted content. You know this with 100% accuracy, or your CMS does.

We offer webmasters an alternative to crawling your site repeatedly to determine if it has changed. Instead, they can ask the crawler of the search engine to visit and collect the most recent content changes.

IndexNow adoption has increased since we enabled the IndexNow Protocol in the Fall 2021.

IndexNow API is used by more than 20 millions websites to publish 2.5 billion URLs every day. IndexNow was responsible for 10% of the new URLs clicked on in search results this month.

IndexNow is also a great tool to have more top-ranking websites, search engines and content management systems like Wix adopting it. IndexNow’s goal is to have more than 50% of the internet adopt it within the next two years.

Why is crawling complex? How big is the internet?

The size of the Internet is infinite. We discover 70 billion unique URLs every day. Spam and duplicate content are everywhere.

Spammers grab a domain and create hundreds of subdomains. Search engines no longer communicate on index size because it is not a good indicator of quality.

How do you get search engines to index the important stuff among all of the low-quality material? We need webmasters who can help search engines find the best content. This can be done best with a combination IndexNow and XML sitemaps. This setup is good for all search engine.

What is the traffic Bing expects to be on websites using its new Bing Chat model

FC We will begin reporting Bing Chat impressions and clicks in Bing Webmaster Tools within the next few weeks so that website owners can compare these to Bing Search results.

Search engines play a key role in helping users find the information they are looking for. Bing’s new features, such as chat, answers and content creation, help to better meet people’s needs.

In this new search world, our goal is to satisfy Bing users while driving more traffic to publishers. We have set this as a priority and measure our success by the amount of traffic that we send to publishers from Bing/Edge.

Early progress is encouraging. According to our data, we have seen an increase in traffic from all types users. We are seeing an increase in usage of Bing/Edge, especially for new scenarios such as chat.

We have also implemented unique ways to drive traffic towards publishers. These include citations in the chat responses that link to sources, and citations beneath the chat results for “learn even more” with links leading to additional sources.

Hovering over links from publishers will show more links, giving users more options to interact and increasing traffic to their website.

We also listen to the positive feedback we receive as we seek ways to maximize this new experience for the ecosystem.

How can I create content that is likely to be cited in Bing Chat?

FC: To support the new AI-powered Bing, Microsoft Edge and Bing Webmaster Tool Guidelines we have updated our Bing Website Tools Guidelines .

The ranking of Bing Chat is based on the same criteria as the main search results page.

Since it is still early, I recommend using the same SEO strategies as before. Most of these are listed in the Bing Webmaster Tools Guidelines.

The post AI and search: Fabrice Canel‘s insights appeared first on Search Engine land.

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