Bing announced today that it is now including more types of entities in its autosuggest feature, including brands, movies, albums, places, software, sports teams, and animal species.
A couple months ago, Bing launched new info about people in autosuggest, so you can type the names of celebrities, politicians, athletes, or even just people with LinkedIn profiles, and Bing will show you information about them right from the search box, like so:
Now, Bing will display information for the aforementioned categories in similar fashion.
“For example, consider the word ‘pitbull,'” says Bing principal development manager Antonio Gulli. “This is an interesting search because you may want results for the artist (a person) or the dog (a breed). Because only you can tell us which one you’re interested in finding, we serve up thumbnails with both the person and the dog. These are very different things that just happen to have the same name. But, Bing understands the difference and gives you the opportunity to select the right one.”
“In order to make these distinctions, Bing utilizes an underlying technology we call Satori that understands the relationships between millions of people, places and things providing you with a more useful model of the digital and physical world,” says Gulli. “All of this computational power allows you to select the most appropriate choice in a matter of milliseconds.”
This is one area where Bing has a clearly better user experience than Google, if you’re looking to get actionable results from the actual search box. While Google will put a Pitbull Google+ profile in its autosuggest feature, it does little with suggestions for any of the examples Bing provides.
That’s not to say Google’s Knowledge Graph results don’t provide ways for users to distinguish what they’re looking for, but you have to get through the search query before you can tell Google what you’re actually looking for (like the Harry Potter books vs. movies, for example). Of course, you could always specify in your actual query.
