Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
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Title: Microsoft's Plan To Fix the Web: Letting Every Website Run AI Search
for Cheap

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/19/1729...

Microsoft has announced NLWeb, an open protocol designed to democratize AI-
powered search capabilities for websites and apps. Developed by Microsoft
technical fellow Ramanathan V. Guha, who previously created RSS and
Schema.org, NLWeb allows site owners to implement ChatGPT-style natural
language search with minimal code. The protocol enables websites to process
complex queries like "spicy and crunchy appetizers for Diwali" or "jackets
warm enough for Quebec," requiring only an AI model, some code, and the
site's own data. During his demonstration to news outlet The Verge, Guha
showed how NLWeb remembers user preferences, such as dietary restrictions,
for future interactions. "It's a protocol, and the protocol is a way of
asking a natural-language question, and the answer comes back in structured
form," explained Guha, who argues the approach is significantly cheaper than
traditional search methods that require extensive web crawling and indexing.
Microsoft is partnering with publishers and companies including TripAdvisor,
Eventbrite, and Shopify to implement NLWeb, though Guha acknowledges the
challenge of achieving widespread adoption in a web that historically tends
toward centralization.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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