In an effort to compete with other search engine, Bing carries on with its AI innovations. Those improvements include autosuggest features, expansion of “People Also Ask”, and growth of the intelligent answer features. Read on to learn all about these AI innovations at Bing.

History of Bing

Before we look to the future of Bing, let’s look at its past. Bing is a search engine, launched by Microsoft in 2009. Microsoft focused, since the beginning, on changing the definition of a search engine. Developers set their sights on creating a “decision engine”, which displayed more information, enabling better decisions. Bing then partnered with Yahoo in 2009 and Facebook in 2010. Bing is now the second largest search engine in the United States.

Autosuggest Improvement

Autosuggest is increasingly common in the modern world. From search engines to texting, autosuggest plays a key part of our digital interactions. The goal of autosuggest is saving users time through fast query completion.

One of the key struggles of search engines is that the longer the query is, the more the engine AI struggles to complete the question. For example, typing in “What is a…” produces many more options than something more specific like “What is a good way to ask…” Bing is using next phrase prediction to improve the full phrase suggestions for longer searches. Now, instead of simply determining the next word, the search tries to determine the next phrase. Hooray for easier searching.

People Also Ask

“People Also Ask” is yet another key feature of search engines. It anticipates what your next search may be by looking at what other people usually search alongside your current query. For example, if you ask “What is SEO?” Bing lists the top three results, provides a SEO definition, then a list of questions, which is the “People Also Ask” questions. Those questions include:

  • What does a SEO company actually do?
  • What is the best way to learn SEO?
  • How does SEO work, exactly?
  • What are the basics of SEO?

All of which are questions that people often ask as follow-up queries to “What is SEO?”

More Languages

One of the benefits of speaking English is that most of the world gears itself toward you. However, there are many other people in the world that this causes issues for. It also shuts off certain parts of the Internet or other technologies to non-English speakers. Bing is expanding their intelligent answers feature to include 100 languages and 200+ regions.

Intelligent answers is an important feature of search engines. Returning to the example, above, the actual definition of SEO as a result for the “What is SEO?” search is the intelligent answers. The intelligent answer is the AI’s best attempt of answering the question directly. Expanding intelligent answers to so many languages is a marked improvement for international access to the Internet.