Over the years the rivalry between search engines has been fierce with Google clearly leading the pack, but Microsoft’s recent investment in deep learning and collaboration with Intel to improve the capabilities of Bing is very promising.
Just a few days ago Microsoft announced the release of new intelligent search features that use artificial intelligence (AI) to provide people with more comprehensive answers, faster. One of the new features is something people have been requesting for quite some time: More answers that include relevant information across multiple sources.
According to the blog post, “Bing now aggregates facts for given topics across several sites for you, so you can save time by learning about a topic without having to check several sources yourself. For example, if you want to learn more about tundras, simply search for ‘tundra biome facts’ and Bing will give you facts compiled from three different sources at the top of the results page.”
Another key feature that we believe will prove to be useful is a hover-over showing definitions for uncommon words. “An enhancement to our intelligent answers we’re rolling out this week gives you insight into unfamiliar topics at a glance. When Bing recognizes a word that isn’t common knowledge, it will now show you its definition when you hover over with the cursor,” they stated.
“For example, imagine you are searching to find answers to a medical question. We’ve given you an answer, but there are some terms in the answer that you aren’t familiar with. Just hover over to get the definition without leaving the page.”
Aside from the above-mentioned additions, there are other very cool features that were integrated and possible only because of technology advancements, especially those made by Intel.
“Delivering intelligent search requires tasks like machine reading comprehension at scale, which require immense computational power. So, we built it on a deep learning acceleration platform, called Project Brainwave, which runs deep neural networks on Intel® Arria® and Stratix® Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) on the order of milliseconds,” the post added.
Ultimately it’s the immense leap in compute power that has unlocked the potential to develop new functionality that is then rolled into existing product offerings. In this case: Bing.
Mark our word… Deep learning is taking over.