Microsoft on Wednesday said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play a much bigger role in some of the latest updates brought to the Bing search engine. This will help Bing in doling out more advanced and improved search results for its users as it looks to put more heat on its dominant search rival Google. The decision to give more AI power to Bing is very much in tune with Microsoft’s strategy to make AI one of the central technical aspects of all its core products and services.
With the latest AI updates, Bing will show multiple viewpoints especially in response to sensitive and politically searched issues. This will help in filtering out fake and biased news and provide much better search results to all users. This update will build on the earlier feature announced in September that allowed Bing to add fact-checks into search results for cutting down on misinformation. However, this latest update would remain muted when someone makes fact-based queries on Bing, for instance, when was Abraham Lincoln born?
The newly updated Bing will also assist people in finding exact information even when they are absolutely clueless about how to really search for it. It will do this by adding prompts to extract more information from the users. This could be the name or any other clue about an object.
Microsoft has also tied with Reddit in order to give better user experience to web browsers. This would mean that from now on Bing will extract information from various Reddit communities like Reddit AMA and showcase it to users. The challenge of analyzing the plethora of information on Reddit and correctly comprehending them will be obviously taken care by the AI.
Lastly, Microsoft has added some new AI features to make Bing more conversational. These features will help browsers to better phrase a query in order to fetch more desirable answers on the first search. Similarly, AI will also help Bing’s image search function to become more powerful by helping it to better identify objects in the photos.
According to reports, these updates will be released in phases in the U.S market. Bing’s new advanced image search will be reportedly available right now, while other conversational and intelligent search will be made available from next month.
But the big question is whether these AI-powered updates will augur well for Bing with respect to its competition with Google. Google, as is well known, still continues to be the no: 1 search engine across the world despite other search engines like Bing and AOL raising their bar over the years.