In a recent post published on the Bing Webmaster Blog, Yan Ke, Principal Development Lead of Bings Relevance Team has stated that Bing has added the functionality to continue the conversation after a user of their search engine is provided with their answer. The premise behind this recent update is that Bing aim to provide users of their search engine with additional relevant information about the topic that they initially searched for. As with all conversations, Bing is hoping to engage with people in a similar way to starting a conversation with a friend, progressing and expanding upon an initial topic Bing’s new functionality allows the user to ask a question in a similar way to how they would ask a friend, and then uses that as a starting point to engage in a more in-depth conversation. Bing aims to not only provide searchers with the information that they requested, but also provide additional relevant information on the original topic. The example provided within the recent blog post by Yan Ke is: “who is the president of the united states”, Bing will not only now provide the information requested ‘Barack Obama’, but also more in-depth information from the initial question, with the examples given of: “who is his wife” or “how tall is he?” the additional information “Michelle Obama,” and, “6 feet 1 inch” will also be provided within the search results. All of this additional information will be served without the need to perform any additional searches. This recent enhancement of Bings search results combines the data within its extensive knowledge repository and the search engines conversational understanding. According to Yang Ke, this new development should allow people to delve deeper into a subject and discover more information about their topic of interest. Even though this is a major enhancement to Bings offering, it is not the first time that we have seen this functionality within a search engine, Google unveiled conversational search in May 2013. Although Bings new functionality is impressive, when performing a conversational search using Google it is possible for the user to talk directly to the search engine by clicking on the microphone within the search box, with Google verbally responding to your ‘questions’ with the information that they requested.
18th August 2014
