Microsoft's Web IQ is a search engine for AI agents
What's the story
Microsoft has announced Web IQ, a suite of APIs designed specifically for artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The platform is aimed at improving the efficiency and comprehensiveness with which these agents can scour the web. "Web IQ is our solution for this type of search engine, and it provides this context ... the web documents, news, images, videos that are relevant for an agent query," said Jordi Ribas, Microsoft's President of search and AI.
AI-focused search
Web IQ is built on Microsoft's Bing experience
Web IQ acts as a search engine for AI systems, connecting them with information from across the web. However, it presents this data differently than traditional search engines do for humans. The platform is built on Microsoft's two-decade-long experience with Bing but has been completely re-architected and rebuilt to optimize it specifically for agents.
Information delivery
Differences in human and AI searches
The way humans and robots search is different, and Web IQ takes that into account. For humans, search results are ranked according to their needs. But for AI agents, it provides a comprehensive yet condensed page of results to parse without using too many tokens. This means high-quality results are delivered quickly in a compact package, something Ribas emphasized during his interview with CNET.
Speed
Web IQ is faster than any other search engine
Ribas claimed that Web IQ leads the industry in search result quality, token efficiency, and latency. It responds in less than 165 milliseconds 95% of the time, making it around 2.5 times faster than any other product on the market. The APIs of Web IQ are part of Microsoft IQ, which has already been powering Microsoft's Copilot AI offering and OpenAI's ChatGPT for quite some time now.
Future
AI agents will outnumber humans in searches by 2026-end
Ribas believes that while the number of searches done by agents may not be as high as some estimates suggest, they will definitely outnumber humans by the end of this year. This is because every chat response requires multiple queries in a system like Web IQ. "We anticipate that agents will easily do more queries than humans," Ribas said, predicting AI systems are going to continue to accelerate and grow.