Microsoft's search engine Bing recently unveiled new methods based on artificial intelligence (AI) — to improve its search capabilities. Some of the main features involve object detection in images, conversational search, and improved machine reading.
Users of Bing will get results from multiple perspectives on the search query involved. For example, the engine would try to present each angle of a news story with different sources aggregated and sorted from similar news sites
This would help deliver both the pros and cons of a particular issue. It will also be easier to browse through the varying views associated with the multitude of news sources.
The upcoming "conversational search" feature promises to make searching the web a more natural and nuanced experience.
Internet enthusiasts may remember that Microsoft released a number of chatbots in the past year, like Xiaoice, Tay, and Zo. The data they gathered from these chatbots are essentially the basis for the conversational search, in addition to algorithms based on billions of text documents.
As for function itself, conversational search provides a more advanced autocomplete feature for the Bing bar. It will suggest phrasings based on a query so that users can get better search results with the least tries involved.
Of course, Microsoft also plans to integrate these AI-driven search features into their other products. They say that intelligent search will be made available to Office365, SharePoint, OneDrive.
Microsoft Excel will especially benefit from intelligent search with its new feature called "Insights." This new feature will help the software check data patterns across spreadsheets, and structure them so that the information will be easier to analyze.
In addition to these, Bing has also partnered with Reddit to make the popular website more searchable. The search engine will include results from Reddit's popular "subreddits" like Ask Me Anything (AMA) and AskReddit.
The new features are expected to roll out to United States Bing users before the month ends.
