Microsoft announced announced that it is adding predictions to Bing search results pages for some queries. These are based on data from searches that have taken place and social input from Facebook and Twitter.
Bing will show such predictions for shows like The Voice, American Idol, and Dancing With the Stars.
“One of the most interesting aspects of search engines is their ability to process trillions of signals to reflect what is happening in the real world,” says Bing. “For instance, during the presidential elections, Bing experiences a surge of positive and negative queries about the presidential candidates from different parts of the U.S. Taking this model even further, teams within Bing have been experimenting with useful ways that we can harness the power of Bing to model outcomes of events. This could be anything from an election or sporting event to whether an actor will win the People’s Choice Award.”
The feature will work when you search for a supported show, or a contestant.
“The central idea behind the direct approach is that winners and losers correspond to popularity,” Bing says. “In broad strokes, we define popularity as the frequency and sentiment of searches combined with social signals and keywords. Placing these signals into our model, we can predict the outcome of an event with high confidence. For The Voice, our model is tuned to account for biases, such as regional preferences, and other measurable and observable trends. We have also learned how to combine the prior popularity of a contestant with the contribution due to his or her performance. Although we might believe that the outcome of this week’s The Voice comes down to how well someone belts out a tune, our data indicates that many people have ‘favorites’ regardless of individual week-to-week performances.”
Bing says users can expect more of this beyond the shows mentioned in the future.
Image via Bing
