
Microsoft open sources code to give any app Bing-like intelligence - JaimeThompson
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/microsoft-open-sources-algorithm-that-gives-bing-some-of-its-smarts/
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danielcampos93
I work on the team that built this and many of our other ranking tech. I can
answer any questions people have.

Also shameless plug: using this tech we released some artificial search
sessions as an exploratory dataset.
[https://github.com/dfcf93/MSMARCO/tree/master/Conversational...](https://github.com/dfcf93/MSMARCO/tree/master/ConversationalSearch)

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yding
Can you explain how this is different from a regular word2vec NLP algorithm?

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danielcampos93
Honestly its not. There is a paper in SIGIR 2019 about how it was trained and
works called 'Generic Intent Representation in Web Search'. The jist of it is
if a document has a sat click from multiple queiries make those vectors closer
together. Do this over a few billion urls and documents and you can make a
vector represenation for any query.

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yding
Thanks for the response! I'll definitely dig into it some more.

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myinnerbanjo
Original article on Microsoft's AI Blog: [https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/bing-
vector-search/](https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/bing-vector-search/)

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ForHackernews
This is probably smart strategy for Microsoft: If they can make search into a
generic commodity, it cuts the legs out from under Google.

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ben509
There's a barrier to entry in that users have been trained by Google,
specifically, they've run many searches with Google and over time the feedback
of hit / miss has trained them to write queries that produce useful results on
Google.

Anyone trying to implement search then either has to be competitive with
Google at handling Google-friendly queries, which is probably impossible, or
somehow train users.

Thus, offering Bing searches as "good enough" and free to many companies makes
a lot of sense.

It would be interesting to see if people adjust how they search on Google vs.
Bing, even if unconsciously.

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bdcravens
A small point, but I noticed that they listed Linux build instructions before
Windows in the README. Yes, it's irrelevant (they are in alphabetical order
after all) but MS of a few years back would have been much pettier about
something like that.

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Nelkins
Github repo:
[https://github.com/microsoft/SPTAG](https://github.com/microsoft/SPTAG)

