Tech giant Microsoft Corporation recently improved its Bing search engine by launching a string of artificial intelligence-powered search capabilities aimed to create a more interactive and refined user experience.
Microsoft announced the development during the AI Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. The company said to have enhanced Bing to better recognize images and objects, provide more accurate answers based on a user’s search history, and add search refinement options all with the use of AI systems.
Bing’s search results can now altogether display multiple sources and perspectives that are selected from an inventory of previously accepted resources. The company-owned search engine now has the capacity to provide users with different angles of any given topic, from articles about its advantages and disadvantages to much deeper stories that are related to it.
The new Bing search engine also has the capability to filter fake news stories and dubious websites as programmers have also added fact-check features to it. Fact-check tags can now be seen below search results, notifying the user of whether a website’s claim is true or not.
A user will no longer have to click the link to check if a website is legit as the search engine could display its own true or false verdict right in the search preview.
However, the feature is said to be not yet 100 percent foolproof as a few dishonest news articles can still penetrate the search results. The company is reportedly aiming to further improve it to a point where all fake news items are easily filtered.
In the same event, Microsoft also announced its partnership with popular social news aggregation site, Reddit.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian made the announcement, saying that the two companies will maximize different AI tools to incorporate Reddit content in Bing searches. Reddit’s trademark, Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, is reportedly set to improve Bing’s results.
Microsoft explained that the Reddit amalgamation was made to accommodate Bing’s new Intelligent Search function, a trait that would make interaction with the search engine more organic.
With the Intelligent Search, Bing users can leverage information from Reddit’s millions of members. For instance, when a user searches for a specific topic like “Donald Trump tax law approval,” there is an option for Bing to give a teaser by providing Reddit’s top conversations for the day about the said topic.
For more general topics, such as “Donald Trump,” Bing can also provide a fragment of those conversations so searchers can easily grasp the viewpoints of Reddit participants.
With these improvements, Bing now has the capacity not only to filter illegitimate results but also to narrow it down to significant articles only. The enhancement uses “conversational AI” that reviews a user’s past searches before giving new results.
The company is also set to apply Intelligent Search on some of its Office 365 products, particularly with SharePoint and OneDrive.
Except for the enhanced image search, these developments will initially be implemented in the U.S. for the meantime. Roll-out to other countries will soon follow as programmers will continue to find and fix glitches should any arise, said Microsoft.
