Bing, and other software companies, like Google, tend to roll out new features slowly. So they might roll out a new feature first to 1% of users, then 10%, then 50% and then eventually 100% of users. This rollout is done randomly to reduce bias, Microsoft Bing’s Mikhail Parakhin said on Twitter.

Mikhail Parakhin was asked, “How are you evaluating which accounts gain access?” How is Bing deciding who should get access to a new feature and who should not.

Mikhail responded, “Random – always purely random, otherwise we would introduce biases.”

Here are those tweets:

Random – always purely random, otherwise we would introduce biases.

— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) June 20, 2023

Truth is, when you push out an Android app update, developers have the option to gradually roll out the update as well. We tend to do this at our company so we can monitor any potential issues we didn’t initially catch in our testing but with a small segment of our app users before everyone sees the change. I can’t really control who sees those updates, outside of really small app test flights.

Forum discussion at Twitter.