Top 10 Questions Asked on Bing this Summer Games

It has been an exciting two weeks at the 2016 Summer Games, packed with competition by thousands of athletes across dozens of sports. Given there’s so much to see, Bing uses its prediction technology to help people discover the ‘Events to Watch’ each day.

But that’s not the only way Bing is helping users to stay informed. With its recently enhanced question answering algorithms, Bing and Cortana are able to provide the most relevant, fresh and comprehensive information for all your questions about the Summer Games–current, past and future.

Curious what others are learning? Check out the top ten most popular questions asked since the start of the 2016 Games, and then go to Bing to find the answer right at the top of the search results, saving you time scouring the web so you can spend more time watching the competitions. Then read on to get a better understanding of the intelligence behind Bing’s answers.

The Top 10 Most Asked Summer Games Questions to Date

1. Who has the most gold medals in the Olympics? Many could probably guess the answer – Michael Phelps, but Bing goes one step further to show a more comprehensive answer by providing the athletes and medal counts of those trailing the leader.

 

2. Who’s on the refugee Olympic team? Over the past year, Bing has seen people searching for news information on refugees, so it only makes sense that the world would want to know who the amazing athletes are that make up the Rio 2016 refugee team at this year’s Games.

 

3. How many medals did the US win in the 2012 summer Olympics? While we are keeping a close eye on the current medal standings, many people want to compare the current Games with the past. Bing and Cortana can answer the medal count for each country. Give it a try!

 

4. When did Berlin host the Olympics? Even with all the action at the Rio Games, there has also been a close eye on Rio as the host. Surprising to us, however, is how many users have searched for information on previous Games hosts. More specifically, the top searched past hosts include Berlin, Paris and USA, in that order.

 

5. Where is the next Olympics? Before the first competition even happened in the 2016 Games, we were seeing a rise in queries about 2020, and as we near the end of this year’s Games it’s no surprise that people are already looking toward the next four years.

 
Below are more top questions from Bing and Cortana users. Check out the answer right away.
6. When and where were the first modern Olympic games held?
7. What’s the world record for the 100m freestyle?
8. How big is an Olympic-size swimming pool?
9. How much gold is in an Olympic gold medal?
10. How old do you have to be to compete in the Olympics?

The Intelligence Behind Bing’s Answers
The Bing team has built a highly powerful and sophisticated query-intent understanding pipeline. When a user types a question, we first classify if this is an Olympics query. If it is, the technology performs two tasks. The first is to parse the query, detecting identifiers (i.e. entities/slots) such as city name, country name, athlete name, event, etc. The second task is to understand the exact intent, such as medal standing, schedule, time, location of Olympics, event winner, etc. With all the information identified, we will send the parsed query to the answer fetching pipeline. The answers reflect real-time data feeds, our knowledge base (Satori), or web-crawled documents based on the query intent. We might generate multiple answers as the content could be complimentary.

 

There’s quite a bit more that goes on behind-the-scenes to make sure we have the freshest content, but hopefully this provides you with a glimpse into the intelligence that goes into delivering answers for the Summer Games, or any query, making it easy to ask a question and quickly find the information needed.

Now… back to the Games!

-The Bing Team