Bing’s Adaptive Search + Action Buttons: For Personalised & Convenient Search
Bing introduces a more personalised and convenient search experience. It has recently rolled out a new innovation which aims to learn user search patterns and in return provide search results tailored to the searcher.
While search engines have gotten undeniably more intelligent over the years, there are still areas in which it faces a greater challenge. One of that is determining user intent. When somebody does a search for the term “restaurant” it could be someone looking for a place to dine or just a regular 8 year old kid, looking up for the word’s definition for his home work. The answer is ambiguous.
The team at Bing, however, believes that it has the answer to this issue. That is through their latest search development — Adaptive Search.
Adaptive Search works by looking for trends based on your previous search. So if it has learned that you are more interested in French cuisine, a search for “restaurant” would highlight French restaurants. By “highlighting”, Bing means to just move the listing (which it thinks you are more interested with) on top of the search results page. According to their official blog post, “We certainly don’t want to make any assumptions that prevent you from seeing a diverse set of results and lock you into a “filter bubble”, so the results that correspond to differing intents will still be available to you on the page.”
Finally, the Bing team also stressed that this latest development does not just consider the search preferences stored in cookies in one’s personal computer or laptop. To quote an answer they gave on the blog’s comment section: “You can sign in to Bing with a Windows Live ID so that your searches are stored in association with your Windows Live ID and can be accessed on every computer that you’ve signed in on, or you can stay signed out so that your searches are accessible only on a single computer.”
Search Personalisation is actually not a new concept and with this recent announcement, people might think that Bing is copying Google. But Bing director Stefan Weitz claims it is “much broader… more complex from a computer science standpoint, but more elegant from a user standpoint”, highly different from Google’s Personalised Search.
Microsoft is always continuing to improve Bing in other search areas. A few days after launching Adaptive Search, a new innovation called Action Buttons has been added. When you search across these seven popular search categories – airlines, couriers, restaurants, banks, rental cars, software downloads and hotels – you will see a set of buttons next to the listing which corresponds to the top actions on the actual site.
Going back to our previous example, say Bing was able to pull up your favorite French restaurant’s website and you wanted to make a reservation, a button to book a table should appear right next to it which you can click to take you directly to the page you want straight from the results page.
With these enhancements, you can truly can spend less time searching and accomplish what you set out to do.
