Karen Blackeman has a long report on a recent round-table in London with the UK development team for Microsoft’s new Bing search-engine…

“Twelve bloggers, including myself and Phil Bradley, were invited to the round table meeting with Microsoft Bing in London on the evening of June 29th. … I suspect that Bing were expecting to be able do a straightforward sales pitch with a few easy questions from a tame audience, which we most definitely were not! I must congratulate the Bing people, though, for the cool way in which they handled the meeting.”

” … only 1 in 4 searches delivers a successful result [on the old MSN search] … a figure of approximately 10 billion pages [for the size of Bing] … using humans and neural networks for ‘training’ the ranking algorithms”