Bing Distill Enters Public Testing, Here’s How It Works

Several months ago, Microsoft quietly opened up Bing Distill for testing but it required an invite to be able to access the new feature. Sometime in the not to distant past, Microsoft began sending out invites for the service and now we have a better look at how the tool works.

The basic idea behind the service is that Bing is crowd-sourcing answers to popular questions to help improve the search engine. As you can see from the image above, you can see how many people are searching for each type of question and then review and rate the question. The goal, by using crowd-sourcing techniques to answer popular questions, is that Microsoft can introduce a unique aspect to Bing’s search results and to also help improve its own mechanical efforts based on the content.

To help encourage users to answer questions, at one point, Microsoft was considering offering up Bing Rewards but it’s not clear from these screenshots if that mechanism is yet in place. Of course, these types of systems can be gamed, so Microsoft will have to be careful about how it uses this content and vets it properly as well.

Invites to participate in this program appear to be rolling out now but if you want to try it out and have not yet registered, you can do so here.

Thanks for the tip @alaskanjackson