Microsoft is taking on Yahoo Answers with Bing Distill

The brilliant thing about the Internet is that, if you have a question, the collective knowledge of the entire human race is archived and ready for you to read. If you can’t find the answer, you can simply connect with people from across the globe through community-driven services such as Yahoo Answers. Microsoft wants to help with this using a new service called Bing Distill which has been rumored to be in the works for a few months. 

Back in January, we scooped that Microsoft was working on a new project called Distill and today, the Redmond based organization is opening up the platform to everyone, provided you get invited. Distill is a way for humans to curate answers that are asked by other humans, the description of the site says “Millions ask, you answer”. While we don’t know much else about how Microsoft will incentivize users to participate, seeing as it is with Bing, it would make sense that Bing Rewards would be tied into the platform. If you want to participate, the tool is beta right now and you need to request an invite, which you can do from the source link below. The platform is going to be used to help Bing improve its search results by injecting data from humans along with its algorithmic results. By answering questions asked by users of Bing and then Microsoft aggregating and augmenting the data on the backend, this platform will help Bing answer the tough questions or very specific questions that can be hard for an algorithm to understand.