At Bing, we understand that search is more than simply finding information and browsing a collection of blue links pointing to pages around the web. We’ve talked about doing instead of searching and how Bing continues to expand its approach to understand the actual world around us.
Today, you’ll see this come to life on Bing.com in a feature called Snapshot. Snapshot brings together information that you need at a glance, with rich connections to deeper information on the people, places, and things you care about made possible by our deep understanding of the real world. To accomplish this, Bing now tracks billions of entities and perhaps more importantly, the billions of relationships between them, all to get you the right data instantly while you search.
New Entities: Introducing Doctors, Lawyers, Dentists and Real Estate Properties
Over the last few months we have surfaced on Bing.com an additional 150 million entities encompassing web actives, doctors, dentists, lawyers, and individual real estate properties. Now when you search for a medical professional, e.g., {dr rhonda newton sammamish}, Bing returns the Snapshot of the professional that includes their specialty, experience, education as well as address and phone number. Searching for new home or heading to a friend’s house for dinner? Now you can get detailed information about an address directly from the Snapshot. Because Bing marries its understanding about entities with web search, you often don’t even need to type in the complete address. E.g., instead of {2700 point dr highland park il 60035}, you can simply type {2700 point dr highland park} and Bing will still return the right property.
Do More
And unlike other search providers, we let you do something with that information. We strive to provide more insights about entities to our users. For example, if you search for Winston Churchill, we show you comprehensive details about him such as birth and death dates, height and pivotal moments in his life.and can connect you to his written work. But, we also let you play audio clips of his most famous speeches directly from the search results page.Similarly when you search for Princeton University, we provide online courses so you can take classes online.
While comprehensiveness is important, we are not only interested in the items themselves, but the relationships between them, helping you understand more about the world and take action more quickly. To help us better connect intent to actions, we have taken an open approach that takes advantage of rich data sources and services across the web, such as Wikipedia, LinkedIn, IMDB, and Netflix. So, when you search for Tom Cruise we can show you his romantic relationships and related movies, which you can then learn more about and potentially watch on your preferred service.
This same approach also extends to local places which is why we surface helpful information on restaurants, venues and hotels through Trip Advisor and Yelp.
While it’s interesting to think about the 1.8 million bottles of wine tracked by the Bing Food & Drink app, or the 2.5 million movies that we track (and the actors, directors, studios, and writers that make those movies) on Bing.com, the effort to better represent entities is much broader than any particular topic area. While some sites can provide a basic level of information (height, age, etc.) it’s a much richer experience to see those items along with related information such as Upcoming Films, Romantic Relationships, and other people that are being searched so you can jump in and explore.
This amount of data in our repositories is also incredibly helpful when asking Bing a question that requires an understanding of natural language such as “who was the third president of the united states” or looking up “united states supreme court justices.” In these cases, Bing can either bring the answer directly to the top of the page, or provide a carousel of results that are just not possible with a simple web search:
We also recognize people today use a variety of devices in their daily life, which is why Bing delivers this intelligent view of the world around us beyond the PC to mobile experiences across iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. For example, on Windows Phone, you can plan a night out while on the go, which allows people to find nearby places to dine, shop, park and also has “picks for you” with recommendations based on what you’ve been searching for, what your Facebook friends enjoy and what’s popular in the area.
This is just the start of our journey. With advancements in Natural User Interface experiences such as gesture or voice, we believe that there’s a world just around the corner where Bing can be more helpful by proactively reminding you to pick up dinner on the way home, or helping you plan a vacation while keeping the weather, flight prices, and exchange rates all in mind.
These are just some of the features of Bing that provide everyone with a greater level of understanding about the world we all live in, which we hope will make Bing more useful to your everyday life.
– Dr. Richard Qian, Bing Index and KnowledgeTeam
