Microsoft Start publishes news stories, photo galleries, and videos from thousands of publishers globally and promotes this content across Microsoft products, including Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Windows, MSN.com, and the Microsoft Start mobile app.
Each time a consumer views the Microsoft Start feed, it refreshes with the latest personalized content. Based on various signals, algorithms select and order content in the feed with editorial oversight. This ranking content system is designed to engage and inform, choosing stories that are the most relevant to each person, while also ensuring the content is timely, newsworthy, high-quality, and safe for work and home.
The relative importance of these parameters may vary each time a news feed is viewed by a user. The algorithms are always evolving as we continually identify and improve signals and experiment with new features.
Microsoft delivers every consumer a personalized news feed to meet each person’s unique set of interests and preferences for content. At the core of this personalization are algorithms that match user preferences with document understanding. These algorithms are designed to select the most relevant content for each user.
A user’s preferences are learned over time by the system through two approaches:
Machine-learning algorithms drive deep document understanding beyond simply recognizing ‘topics’: The system performs analysis on each document to get insights based on text and metadata and converts the content into a mathematical model.
The two mathematical models – user preferences and document understanding – can be compared to select content that is the closest match for each person.
Besides directly matching content with each user, the algorithms also search for content that engages users with similar preferences.
We want to promote the quality content in our feed that has no visual defects that result in a poor user experience. To avoid having your content see limited exposure make sure you are following the publishing guidelines including the following:
Content that is high quality and without defects such as unformatted text has a higher probability of getting visibility in the feed. Make sure it has the proper sentence and paragraph structure and coding when you upload it. Articles without any line breaks or paragraph breaks will not be promoted in the feed.
Example of formatted text: <p>This is a paragraph.</p> (Note the opening and closing code).
Links back to the original article can only appear at the bottom of the article. Posts that link back to the original within the main body of the text will have limited reach.