Articles
Now has the same intelligent-search abilities as Google
Microsoft is giving Bing more intelligence—and a dash of Reddit | Fast Company
Microsoft announces new AI-powered search features for Bing | The Verge
My Comments
Microsoft’s Bing search engine is inching closer to be on an equal footing to Google Search by implementing a host of new features that will be of benefit to users, metasearch providers and voice-driven assistants.
Recently, they provided support for fact-check tags so that users can know whether a news story is for real or not. This has been enhanced with the ability to show the fact-check results as supplied by the fact-checking organisation in the search-results list so you don’t need to visit the link to verify a claim.
Now they are interlinking with Reddit to bring forth results that have been drafted out through that forum. There is also object recognition for image-based searches along with machine reading to parse text and extract the meaning from it.
Bing will also support conversational search functionality, an effort based on Microsoft’s previous chatbot projects. It will also include aggregating resources about news events from multiple sources and with multiple perspectives, most likely from a list of news sources trusted by Microsoft.
This effort associated with Bing is also based on information search and analysis features that are being baked in to Microsoft’s Office 365 “software-as-a-service” functionality for their established Office desktop productivity suite. It is also in conjunction to the Insight functionality that Microsoft has just baked in to Excel.
What I see of this is a strong effort for Microsoft to become a viable competitor to Google in the “intelligent search” competition as far as full search engines (those who run their own search robots and build their own indexes) are concerned. I see this in response to Apple switching away from Bing to Google as the “driver” search engine for the Siri voice-driven assistant and Spotlight, the integrated search functionality baked in to MacOS.
But I also see this benefiting a range of Internet actors such as metasearch engines which aggregate results from established search-engine indexes, companies who want to integrate Web search in their product’s or service’s functionality as well as voice-driven assistants of the Alexa or Cortana kind. In this context, it is capitalising on a stronger partnership that Microsoft recently struck with Amazon so they can work together and share knowledge to improve the Cortana and Alexa voice-driven assistants.
It is a step in the right direction to provide a competitive intelligent-search function for the Web rather than having Google own the marketplace for this level of search functionality.
