Live QnA will be an extension to the search engine.
Justin Osmer is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Online Services Group. This “online” division includes the MSN portal and all the services of the Windows Live line, including the search engine. One of the most promising areas of development is the live QnA distributed knowledge base (now in beta).
In an interview with Stone Temple, Justin talks about the fundamental difference between their product and Yahoo! Answers , the undisputed leader (both in terms of the number of users and test results ) in the current market of question-and-answer systems. If Yahoo! Answers is positioned as a “thing in itself”, a universal platform for user communication and a social network, then Live QnA has a different purpose.
Live QnA should come to the rescue of a standard search engine where it cannot cope. No modern search engine is fundamentally able to answer ordinary human questions, for example, "What are the cool Italian places in Seattle?". Besides the fact that this question is generally difficult to understand for a car (what are “Italian places”?), The answer to it also depends on fashion, which is rapidly changing. Today one restaurant is popular, and tomorrow another. There are a lot of people who have such “indigestible” questions for the machine, and now they are increasingly turning to them on the Internet. According to Microsoft, traditional search engines must learn to respond to them, albeit with the help of other users.
In the near future, Microsoft may begin integrating the database of questions and answers into the search engine Live Search. A special text box will appear at the bottom of the search results page, where each user can ask his question if he has not found an answer to it among the usual search results. In addition, the answers to the search query from the database of answers may appear immediately among the search results in the special field “Instant answer” (now the text from the Encarta encyclopedia appears there).
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The main problem to be solved is the development of an effective rating / voting system so that the search results can be guaranteed to display the most accurate and complete answer to any question. It is assumed that users should determine the best answer by voting, but each vote must have a different weight.
As you know, Microsoft has the ability to integrate almost any web service into the Windows operating system and thus attract millions of users to the site. In this sense, the Live QnA system has good prospects, because the number of active users is a critical parameter for this kind of social services. So, there are 260 million accounts in Windows Live Hotmail now, and 255 million in Live Messenger. These people are already registered with Microsoft and can use Live QnA without any problems - asking questions and writing answers.
During the testing of Live QnA, it became clear that much of the questions and answers are related to local information that is geographically tied to a particular city, district. Therefore, the Live QnA service, quite possibly, will also be tied to a local search.
Full text of the interview
In an interview with Stone Temple, Justin talks about the fundamental difference between their product and Yahoo! Answers , the undisputed leader (both in terms of the number of users and test results ) in the current market of question-and-answer systems. If Yahoo! Answers is positioned as a “thing in itself”, a universal platform for user communication and a social network, then Live QnA has a different purpose.
Live QnA should come to the rescue of a standard search engine where it cannot cope. No modern search engine is fundamentally able to answer ordinary human questions, for example, "What are the cool Italian places in Seattle?". Besides the fact that this question is generally difficult to understand for a car (what are “Italian places”?), The answer to it also depends on fashion, which is rapidly changing. Today one restaurant is popular, and tomorrow another. There are a lot of people who have such “indigestible” questions for the machine, and now they are increasingly turning to them on the Internet. According to Microsoft, traditional search engines must learn to respond to them, albeit with the help of other users.
In the near future, Microsoft may begin integrating the database of questions and answers into the search engine Live Search. A special text box will appear at the bottom of the search results page, where each user can ask his question if he has not found an answer to it among the usual search results. In addition, the answers to the search query from the database of answers may appear immediately among the search results in the special field “Instant answer” (now the text from the Encarta encyclopedia appears there).
')
The main problem to be solved is the development of an effective rating / voting system so that the search results can be guaranteed to display the most accurate and complete answer to any question. It is assumed that users should determine the best answer by voting, but each vote must have a different weight.
As you know, Microsoft has the ability to integrate almost any web service into the Windows operating system and thus attract millions of users to the site. In this sense, the Live QnA system has good prospects, because the number of active users is a critical parameter for this kind of social services. So, there are 260 million accounts in Windows Live Hotmail now, and 255 million in Live Messenger. These people are already registered with Microsoft and can use Live QnA without any problems - asking questions and writing answers.
During the testing of Live QnA, it became clear that much of the questions and answers are related to local information that is geographically tied to a particular city, district. Therefore, the Live QnA service, quite possibly, will also be tied to a local search.
Full text of the interview
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/5100/
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