[yegg]

No, it's really not. What people don't realize about search is things get clicked on in an exponential fashion, with each piece down the page being engaged with about half as much, so nearer to the bottom of the visible page, 100x less. Since instant answers are often on top, the % of engagement on non-traditional links is much lower than one would otherwise think. And as mobile searches are now the majority, local results (including maps, places listings, etc.) occur on a large % of searches. Same for Wikipedia content. And neither of those are sourced by Bing, along with dozens of other popular Instant Answers driven by many different indexes. Put another way, we have a very large search codebase and overall engineering team, and all of this technology is doing something, and we believe something good!

[hna86]

Could you quantify this with some numbers? What proportion of the requests you get every day are answered completely by your own index, without using Bing?

[mda]

I am pretty sure you won't get an answer to this question, it was asked many times before but nothing was revealed, who knows maybe their agreement with bing binds them, or it is just terrible for their business / illusion.