Why Bing Sees Its Users as Customers According to Fabrice Canel

The Low-down on IndexNow From Mr Bingbot 02 November 2021 at 18 H CEST (Paris)

Fabrice Canel is a principal program manager at Bing, Microsoft. In this video interview with Jason Barnard, he explains how machine learning algorithms are designed to satisfy Bing’s users (who are actually customers).

00:00 Fabrice Canel
00:08 The main input they give to Machine Learning algorithms
00:12 How does Bing satisfy their “customers”?

Transcript

You’re just giving the machine the goals you want it to achieve. Absolutely. Yes. The main input we give the Machine Learning algorithms is satisfying Bing customers. And so we look at various dimensions to satisfy Bing customers.

Again, if you query for Facebook, you want the Facebook link at the top position. You don’t want some random blogs speaking about Facebook. That’s a good example. Very good point. And the other thing you say there is customer, and I think that’s something we all miss. We talk about users, but in fact, as you said, you were a commercial company, same thing with Google, the search results are actually a product and we’re looking at customers or you’re looking at customers and you’re considering what’s good for my customer. And once you say customer instead of user, I think it changes our perspective of what we’re asking you to do.