Decision Engine “Bing”, Microsoft’s bang

Posted By Afif Fattouh on November 13th, 2009

The layout is clean and uncluttered; the daily image is rotated to provide an attractive background and landing page. Bing is aesthetically successful, but is it anywhere near perfect semantic search engine?

The competition in this area is fierce especially after the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership has been approved. Regardless, Google is still the dominant player in the field although it relies completely on the individual words you type into its search bar, and its approach does very little to understand the possible meaning created by joining two or more words together. Unlike Bing that’s claimed by Microsoft to have rich Natural Language Search; meaning that it attempts to understand the full meaning of the phrase typed in while searching, and returns results based on that understanding.

The technology was developed by the company acquired by Microsoft, “Powerset”, for nearly $100 Millions. However, it’s still in the early stages of full semantic search. “With an existing search infrastructure, incredible capital resources, unlimited data, a leading search team, and clear mission to revolutionize the search landscape, Microsoft can rapidly accelerate our progress in building semantic search technology and bringing it to full Web scale,” Powerset’s Mark Johnson said.

The other advancement in Internet search business, Google and Microsoft signed an agreement with Twitter to share tweets in the search results in real-time, which is called “Live Search”. Similarly, Microsoft has signed another agreement with Facebook to share such information, but where’s Google in all this? Chances are that Google and Facebook are still negotiating a deal to arrange an agreement.

The Internet is moving in a whole new direction, and a full semantic search engine could be the Internet’s moon landing.