14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is stealing the show these days when it comes to search engines, even though Bing isn’t exactly the most popular solution out there.
The company has recently decided to integrate its Cortana personal assistant within the web search, which basically means you’ve got contextualized searches on the web.
Now, what Cortana is offering is not new by any means, and Microsoft is actually quite late to the personal assistants’ party. Apple’s Siri and, later, Google Now have started offering basically the same thing. You can ask them “what’s the weather like in New York” and then ask them “how about tomorrow?” and they’ll know that the two searches are related.
Cortana comes with pretty much the same capabilities, offering people the results they need without them having to repeat themselves to no end just to get additional information.
Well, while Apple and Google have both gone to great lengths to perfect these features for their phones, where having a personal assistant that can set up reminders for you, send emails, search for relevant information and provide quick replies was essential, they haven’t expanded the technology onto their web platforms.
Microsoft is, therefore, one step ahead of them both as it starts turning Bing into a search engine you can have a conversation with, not just display simple search results. This makes Bing a rather smart tool to use, now setting the trend for how search engines should act and look like.
It shouldn’t be a surprise if we see Google transporting the contextualizing capabilities of Google Now into Search as a response to Microsoft’s efforts.
Let’s be clear, however, that Bing is far from being perfect, just like the personal assistants of its competitors. The “conversational understanding” boasted by Microsoft, and in similar terms, by Google and Apple, only works for few topics.
You won’t get clear answers for all searches you make on either platform, whether you speak out your desires or type them down, use the computer or your smartphone. In fact, Google is more likely to deliver to you a clear answer on the web search engine, than Bing, despite Microsoft’s efforts to smarten Bing up a bit.
Even so, it is encouraging to see that search engines are getting more and more useful by the day. All companies have been putting in an effort to deliver powerful tools that are not only particularly useful, but that can understand your plain talk and where you don’t have to express yourself as if you were a robot while looking for one thing or another on search engine.
There is a lot of space for improvement, of course, but that can be said about all online services. It should be quite interesting now to see how fast Google will pledge to integrate the technology necessary for full contextualization, which basically means integrating Google Now into search.
After all, Google prides itself with being one of the most used search engines on the planet, with a huge market share in all corners of the globe, except for a few areas, such as China.