Microsoft Says 20% Of Bing Results Offer Direct Answers

In a Financial Times article from a few weeks ago, that mostly covered Google’s MUM, there was a bit about Microsoft Bing in there. It had a super interesting stat that reads “the ability to extract answers from text has already enabled Bing to offer direct answers to 20 per cent of the queries it gets, according to Ribas.”

Jordi Ribas is the head of engineering and product at Microsoft Bing.

It sounds like he is saying that for 20% of all queries done on Microsoft Bing, Bing will serve up direct answers. Those direct answers are extracted from text on a page that Bing can recognize as a solid answer for that query.

It is not 100% clear to me what that 20% number is referring to but I think it means 20% of all queries have a direct answer in Bing – but I can be wrong. What do you think?

I spotted this via Glenn Gabe:

And an interesting stat from Bing’s head of engineering. 20% of queries: “The ability to extract answers from text has already enabled Bing to offer direct answers to 20% of the queries it gets, according to Ribas.” pic.twitter.com/KVKEZKWUev

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 19, 2021

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Rosh Hashanah.