Sometimes when you ask a single question, the answer you are given sparks another question in mind. Because the she same thing may happen on the internet, Microsoft Bing developed a new feature to answer the premise.
In a blog post on August 13th, 2014, Bing said that it added functionality that will continue the conversation after users find the answers they seek in Bing's search results.
Bing, Microsoft's search engine that turned 5 years old this year, said that this feature allow users ask questions the way they would ask their friends for information and notes this most recent development combines conversational understanding with its database of knowledge, which includes information on billions of people, places, and things. That, in turn, allows users to "dive and learn more about a topic or interest," said Bing.
"These improvements build on extensive work we have done to build out the Bing platform including investments in entity and conversational understanding," wrote Yan Ke, Principal Development Lead of the Bing Relevance Team. "This is a long journey, and we expect to deliver a number of additional improvements in the days ahead."
Bing's conversation feature isn't quite like Cortana, the digital assistant first introduced in Microsoft's Windows Phone 8.1 operating system. At least, but not yet. Despite that, Bing can maintain the context through search query to provide a conversation-like experience. This means that users can now have contextualized searches on the web.
Cortana has the similar follow-on search features, as does Google Now, but both are largely contained to mobile platforms. Bing's update for its desktop search version is part of Microsoft's continued efforts to leverage the company's search work as a platform across all of its services and apps. The conversation feature might be a good addition, but the company didn't introduce it as a major change to Bing.
Microsoft is planning to add improvements, and keep the new feature as a minor update. The company is betting on users to search in similar ways on desktop with the same queries used on mobile devices.
Conclusion
Bing isn't the most popular solution for searching something on the internet. Google has won the search engine battle with competitors struggling to keep up. Despite its lesser market share, Bing's minor changes are stealing the show.
Microsoft has made Bing more useful over the years, partly by integrating a wider range of information from outside sources into results. Data from social sites like Facebook and Twitter plays a part in this, as well as data from services like IMDb and Netflix. And in early 2014, Bing expanded its indexing capability to include more information about professionals like doctors, lawyers and real estate.
Cortana comes with pretty much the same capabilities, offering people the results they need without them having to repeat themselves to get additional information. But its competitor, Apple's Siri and Google's Now have both gone to great length to perfect these features. Although they are the personal assistants that can set reminders, send emails, search for information, and do many other common tasks, Apple and Google have not yet implement the technology into their web platforms.
With this minor change, Bing is going a step ahead of the game by becoming a smarter tool to use, and setting a new trend for how search engine should be and act. Google also has a conversational search mode that works in a similar way, though it only works on limited environment (initially in Chrome and Google's mobile search app).
And if search engines do get totally conversational someday in the future, people won't need to express themselves as if they are robots while looking for something on the web anymore.