Microsoft Open-Sources a Crucial Algorithm Behind Its Bing Search Services

Bing can return a natural language result telling the user the Eiffel Tower is 1,063 feet, even though the word “Eiffel” never appeared in the search query and the word “tall” never appears in the result. Microsoft uses vector search for its own Bing search engine, and the technology is helping Bing better understand the intent behind billions of web searches and find the most relevant result among billions of web pages. “Bing processes billions of documents every day, and the idea now is that we can represent these entries as vectors and search through this giant index of 100 billion-plus vectors to find the most related results in 5 milliseconds,” said Jeffrey Zhu, program manager on Microsoft’s Bing team.

Source: blogs.microsoft.com