Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly hot topic for search with Bing introducing their own AI search tools for users at an event earlier this week not only for the search engine but Cortana and Microsoft Office as well. This AI shift focuses on three main categories of tools including intelligent answers, intelligent image search and conversational search. Intelligent answers offers an extended version of snippets with varied responses and results for search queries. Rather than presenting single responses, Bing is providing users with a fuller understanding of their search query through source comparison. Image search has been on the rise with platforms such as Pinterest getting involved and now Bing has thrown their hat into the ring with their intelligent image search. Similar to what Pinterest provides users, Bing can now search through images, targeting buildings and items for visual search with fashion and furniture capable of presenting ‘shoppable’ results for online retailers. Finally their final AI update is the conversational search function, which can assist users in narrowing down their queries for more specific results. This is done by presenting potential narrowed search terms for the original query suggesting improved search terms for greater result accuracy. While Google is still the current search powerhouse, Bing’s AI features have the potential to provide strong competition for not just the search engine but the Google assistant as well.
