14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is pretty much the only company that’s competing against Google in the search industry, and by the looks of things, the software giant has no intention to give up on this fight anytime soon.
Furthermore, Microsoft has prepared advanced new features that could help bring more users from Google to its very own Bing search engine, and one of them is support for bots on the results page.
Bots are the new thing at Microsoft and the company unveiled the Bot Framework in San Francisco last year, but the effort is now being expanded at full speed, including on the Bing search engine results page for businesses.
Microsoft offered a demo of the new bots at the Build developer conference a few hours ago, showing that visitors can interact with a specific business straight from the results page. Specifically, users searching the web for businesses (like restaurants and stuff) can click an option called “Chat” to connect to a bot if available and start a conversation about things like reservations, menus, and whatever they are interested in.
Try the bot yourselves
Bringing bots on the results page seems to be useful for both businesses and users, as bots can be used to interact with visitors without any human interaction on the business side, while visitors can get the information they need instantly.
In Microsoft’s demo, getting information about a restaurant in Seattle was possible with a dedicated bot that could offer details like menus, parking, reservations, and accepted payment solutions, with owners allowed to expand capabilities of the bot with whatever info they want.
You can try out the new bot yourself by simply searching Bing (make sure you are on the US version) for “Monsoon Restaurant Seattle” and the clicking the Chat button. The conversation is performed on Skype and you can even transfer it from browser to Skype if you find this more convenient.
In addition to making bots available on the search engine results page, Microsoft also wants to make them a more important part of its search engine, so it plans to make Bing a directory for bots. This should help users find specific bots or browse them by category, thus enhancing the searching experience without actually having a specific keyword in mind.
