Lately it seems all of the search engine related news has been revolving around Google. The new webmaster tools navigation, the display of favicons within text ads, etc. Even Yahoo jumped into the news with their new search engine ads testing; so it’s nice to finally hear something from the team over at Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Bing has announced the plan to expand upon the categories which will show up in their autosuggest results. These will now include brands, movies, albums, places, software, sport teams, animal species and more. For example, consider a search for the word “pitbull“. This is an interesting search because you may want results for the artist (a person) or the dog (a breed). Because only you really know which one you’re interested in finding, Bing serves up thumbnails with both the person and the dog. These are very different things that just happen to have the same name. But, Bing understands the difference and gives you the opportunity to select the right one.
In order to make these distinctions, Bing utilizes an underlying technology that they call Satori which understands the relationships between millions of people, places and things; thus providing you with a more useful model of the digital and physical world. All of this computational power allows you to select the most appropriate choice in a matter of milliseconds.
Let’s take a look at another type of search though. This time for a city landmark. If you search “Empire state building” Bing provides relevant information about this place directly in the search box so you have an initial sense of the results you’ll get when you click through.
I imagine that in the future the ability to search for financial district restaurants will return an autosuggest of the top rated restaurants within your local financial district – but that is merely a guess. It’s also interesting to note that the display resembles a mini (Google) Knowledge Graph, with small image thumbnails and descriptions appearing to the right of the text suggestions – so it would be interesting to see now what Google will come up with in return.