We spend a lot of time focused on innovations at Google, but we should never forget that one of the drivers of innovation is competition.
In this episode of our popular Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Eric Enge explains how Bing continues to drive innovation in search engine technology and application.
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Resources
- SMX Advanced Recap: Bing’s Fabrice Canel keynote
- See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
Transcript
Mark: Eric, you covered the SMX Advanced keynote of Bing’s Fabrice Canel. Why don’t you start by telling us who he is?
Eric: Fabrice Canel is the Principal Program Manager for Microsoft’s search engine Bing. In particular, his team works on Bing’s abilities to crawl, process and index the web.
Mark: Great. What’s one area of innovation Bing is pursuing these days?
Eric: They’re working to make search more intelligent. For example, they’re getting better at sentiment analysis, a practical application that is giving different results to someone searching for ways in which video games are good for you than for someone who wants to know why they are bad for you.
They’re also serving up more multi-perspective results, realizing that for some queries there’s no one right answer. For example, you’re looking at a Bing featured snippet right now showing articles with opposing viewpoints on video games.
Mark: That’s great, but what about when the user’s query doesn’t contain an obvious sentiment or intent?
Eric: In those cases, Bing is serving up more and more clarifying questions to quickly get to the user’s actual intent. In this example that we’re showing now, the user has just entered “stress management.” Bing responds with a question, ” What do you want to know about this treatment?” And then provides a series of tappable boxes with various approaches to stress management.
Mark: Okay, now we know Google Search is making big strides in the area of artificial intelligence, is Bing working on that too?
Eric: They sure are, but not just in the things that are visible to users. For example, Bing is using AI to build a more intelligent crawler. This is needed because content on the web is just not simple; it may change frequently or be removed or hidden. Bing has to be able to detect and decide what to do with things like duplicate content, JavaScript. CSS, mobile versus desktop presentations, and more.
A particular innovation of this past year was Bing’s announcement of support for Schema implemented in JSON-LD and then support for debugging the same in Bing’s webmaster tools. And, Bing as also extending its support for AMP or the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project.
Mark: It sounds like a lot is going on at Bing and both users and SEOs should not count them out.
Eric: Not at all, and in fact, I’m glad to see that there is still some competition that drives innovation in search.
Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.
See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
Great things I have heard from here. I think within a few years Bing will able to provide more advance and intelligent search result for its user’s. AI is one of the biggest factors to become more competitive with GOOGLE search engine.
I do believe Innovative technology is crucial for BING to identify any fake contents, news, photos and so on to stop spreading the rumor.