Owen Yin shared some screenshots of what he said he saw on the Microsoft Bing website. It looks like the beta version of the upcoming ChatGPT features that we are all expecting Bing to announce in the coming weeks (maybe even this coming Tuesday).

Owen shared these screenshots on Twitter and then posted more details on Medium.

Here is the home page screenshot that widens and enlarges the search box and says “Ask me anything”:

Here is his screenshot of the results, the answers being returned:

And here is the GIF he made of this:

It would not surprise me if this is being tested in the wild by Microsoft Bing, as all the evidence leads to a big announcement about this type of feature being released sometime in the next week or so.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google has updated its search help documentation around canonicalization this morning. The Google Search Relations team split in three distinct sections and updated a lot of the content to provide clearer details around how Google Search and canonicalization works.

The three sections include:

All of this use to be on a single help page, which you can review on the Wayback Machine over here to compare.

With this, Gary Illyes from Google dropped another LinkedIn tip on the topic of canonicalization, he wrote:

Friday ramble: you can stack canonicalization signals to strengthen that hint.

You have a rel=canonical pointing from A to B, but A is HTTPS, it’s in your hreflang clusters, all your links are pointing to A, and A is included in your sitemaps instead of B. Which one should search engines pick as canonical, A or B?

If you just change the URLs from A to B in your sitemaps and hreflang clusters, combined with that rel=canonical it might already be enough to tip over canonicalization to B. Change the links also, and you have an even greater chance to convince search engines about your canonical preference.

Recently, Gary also mentioned to use absoluate URLs for rel-canonical.

So check out these new docs and learn a bit more on canonicalization and Google Search.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.

As a reminder, since April, Bing has been slowly testing a new BingBot user agent, slowly rolling it out to more percentages of crawls over the year. It should have rolled out to 100% of all crawls last month. But now Fabrice Canel said this week that it is near 100%, and an announcement is coming sometime today from Microsoft.

Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing wrote on Twitter, “We are near 100% and are proactively monitoring and rolling back any website having issues. Stay tuned for more communication Friday.”

Initially, Bing said it would be rolled out by Fall 2022, then January 2023. Maybe today is the day?

Here has been the rollout so far:

• April 2022: Less than 5% of crawls
• July 2022: 5% of all crawls
• September 2022: 20% of all crawls
• October 2022: 50% of all crawls
• February 2023: New 100% of all crawls

Let’s see what Fabrice announces today.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Confirmed, it is fully live according to Fabrice on LinkedIn.

Yes @rustybrick 💯% today (we fallback to previous user agents where appropriate). More information on Bing Crawler User Agents: https://t.co/n0ILIEUz0I https://t.co/49ILtJDuL0

— Fabrice Canel (@facan) February 3, 2023