As part of its Microsoft Build event, the company behind Windows, Bing and Copilot announced what it calls Natural Language Web, or NLWeb for short. As is with the theme of the event, this is another AI-related announcement, but it puts forward a strange use case scenario – interacting with websites like you would an AI chatbot.
Microsoft describes NLWeb as an open project, claiming that it is tech agnostic. Meaning that website operators can use their preferred AI model, not necessarily Copilot, to be paired with data of their own choosing, which would be anything that they would publish on their website anyway.
The Idea is that, if everything works as expected, visitors to the website can use natural language to navigate information provided in the site. This means typing a query into the search bar substitute the kind of information you want, and the local AI model compiling the info for you.
That being said, the result of the query may still look like a more conventional results page following typing into a search bar, as the Eventbrite example provided suggests. Though with the implementation of natural language, you can likely include filters into the queries themselves and have the search results reflect your specifications. But beyond that’s it’s unclear in what way the implementation of NLWeb will change the average web browsing experience.
On the flip side, this is claimed to be cheaper for website operators. Speaking to The Verge, Microsoft technical fellow Ramanathan V. Guha says “I just take an RSS feed, put it in a vector database, and runs off that”. The report also mentions that traditional search is expensive for both the search engines and the websites involved, due to the process of crawling the web and the indexing process.
