Microsoft Bing's new intelligent search features will make you ditch Google

At a press event yesterday, Microsoft announced several new features powered by AI coming to Bing. Many of the newly announced features will be really helpful to millions of users as they are focused on everyday tasks.

For example, when you ask questions on search engines, you have to click into multiple sources to get a comprehensive answer. Using the power of AI, Bing is trying to solve this problem by bringing together content from across multiple sources. Check out the image above to know how this experience will look like to end users.

Sometimes, the answers for the questions you ask may not be available on the web directly. For example, consider the below query.

Bing was able to understand your query and come up with the result by understanding the contents in a webpage. Bing is using deep neural networks to validate answers by aggregating across multiple reputable sources. Microsoft noted that this feature makes use of the state of the art in machine reading comprehension, backed by Project Brainwave running on Intel’s FPGAs, to read and analyze billions of documents to understand the web.

For some queries, there might not be one definite answer. For example, if you ask “Is coffee good or bad”, there will be tons of content on the web explaining why it is bad and why it is good. In such cases, Bing will display will aggregate the two different viewpoints from reputable sources and present it on the top of the page to save you time.

In case there are multiple ways to answer your question, Bing will present you with a carousel of intelligent answers like the below.

Microsoft is also improving the comparison answers. When you search to compare two different things, Bing will provide snapshot of the key differences between two items or topics in an easy-to-read table.

All these new features will be rolling out to users in the US over the next week with expansion to other markets over time.

Microsoft yesterday also announced partnership with Reddit for the following new search experiences.

• While already in Bing, when you search for a specific Reddit topic or subreddit, like “Reddit Aww”, Bing will surface a sneak peak of the topic with the top conversations for the day from Reddit.
• When searching for a general topic that is best answered with relevant Reddit conversations, Bing will surface a snippet of those conversations at the top of the page so you can easily get perspectives from the millions of Reddit users.
• Bing will be the place to go to search for Reddit AMAs, Q&As with celebrities and every day heroes hosted by the Reddit community. On Bing you can discover AMA schedules and see snapshots of AMAs that have already been completed. Simply search a person’s name to see their AMA snapshot or search for “Reddit AMAs” to see a carousel of popular AMAs.

Learn more about new features coming to Bing here.