Bing Now Provides a "Yes" or "No" Summary Answers to Queries

Bing now Provides Yes or No Summary Answers to Queries

It’s not uncommon for searchers to look across various sources to feel confident about answers. According to Microsoft executives, Bing’s intelligent answers feature works the same way.

It goes through several documents to find and generate the best intelligent answers to queries. That way, users will save more time, effort, and brainpower too.

Now Bing going one step further.

The Microsoft-owned search engine will summarize answers with a single word — “Yes” or “No.” Aside from the one-answer, the new search feature also comes with a carousel of related excerpts from various sources.

Some queries can also trigger the option to refine the search for a more specific answer. Users can click on any of the refined search options to get another Yes or No summary answers.

The feature is already live in the United States, and it’s set to expand to more countries soon.

So, how does it work?

Using Natural Language Modeling to Generate “Yes” or “No” Summary Answers

Bing uses natural language modeling to bring this excellent search experience to users.

Researchers at Bing began with a sizeable pre-trained language model, adjusted it to perform two separate complementary tasks. These are:

Assessing how relevant a document is to the user query
Providing a Yes or No summary answer after consulting various sources

Before:

After:

Using Natural Language Modeling to generate Yes or No summary answers — Image Credit: blogs.bing.com

In the example above, Bing used Natural Language Representation (NLR) model to conclude that “chocolate is toxic to dogs.”

The blog post announcement from Bing reads:

“Thanks to the language understanding brought by NLR, the model can infer that “chocolate is toxic to dogs” means that dogs cannot eat chocolate, even though an individual source may not explicitly say that.”

That’s because the model now understands complex and ambiguous concepts better than before. As a result, it’s able to puzzle out query intent, which in turn improves search relevance.

If you’re a webmaster or SEO, consider tracking the keywords that you’re currently ranking for, which could trigger the Yes or No summary answers feature. Also, you may want to monitor potential shifts in impressions and traffic.