Ali Alvi - How Featured Snippets Work on Bing
Posted: Sun Feb 16, 2025 9:13 am
This article, published in English on Search Engine Journal, is the third in a series of five articles devoted to the functioning of the Bing algorithm, and based on a series of interviews conducted all around the world!
In this post, you’ll get some insider tips on featured snippets from Ali Alvi, officially “Senior Program Manager of AI Products, Bing,” and in short, the director of the Featured Snippets team (called Q&A at Bing). But you’ll quickly see how much more he’s shared than “just” a guide on how to land a featured snippet.
Illustrations: Véronique Barnard
During the podcast interview (“With Jason Barnard…”, available on the Kalicube.pro YouTube channel ), I was looking for information on how Bing generates Questions/Answers (the equivalent of featured armenia phone number data snippets at Google)... In reality, I mainly wanted to know how they extracted, among the hundreds of billions of pages on the web, the best answer to their users' questions.
But he taught me MUCH more than that.
image.png
Questions and Answers
Initially, I wanted to better understand the Featured Answers algorithm. How do these search engines choose “the best answer” to a question? And by the same token, I wanted to understand how to better optimize for answer engines: Answer Engine Optimization, that’s my thing!
Descriptions under the blue links
But I got as a bonus an explanation of how the algorithm that generates the descriptions used under the traditional blue links works. It turned out that the two are intimately linked.
In this post, you’ll get some insider tips on featured snippets from Ali Alvi, officially “Senior Program Manager of AI Products, Bing,” and in short, the director of the Featured Snippets team (called Q&A at Bing). But you’ll quickly see how much more he’s shared than “just” a guide on how to land a featured snippet.
Illustrations: Véronique Barnard
During the podcast interview (“With Jason Barnard…”, available on the Kalicube.pro YouTube channel ), I was looking for information on how Bing generates Questions/Answers (the equivalent of featured armenia phone number data snippets at Google)... In reality, I mainly wanted to know how they extracted, among the hundreds of billions of pages on the web, the best answer to their users' questions.
But he taught me MUCH more than that.
image.png
Questions and Answers
Initially, I wanted to better understand the Featured Answers algorithm. How do these search engines choose “the best answer” to a question? And by the same token, I wanted to understand how to better optimize for answer engines: Answer Engine Optimization, that’s my thing!
Descriptions under the blue links
But I got as a bonus an explanation of how the algorithm that generates the descriptions used under the traditional blue links works. It turned out that the two are intimately linked.