Exploring Microsoft Bing’s Search Results Quality

Apple surprised many users worldwide when it announced that it was replacing Google with Bing for the iOS7. Many were alarmed as it is widely believed that Bing is no match for Google. However, perhaps Apple knows more than its users, and there would have to be valid reasoning behind this choice.

Some assume that Apple has made this choice just to spite Google. However, these are big businesses, and businesses hardly ever make emotional decisions. Users are left wondering about Bing’s search capability, particularly after they have spent the last 10 years working extensively in order to improve the quality of search results. Many are now beginning to check Bing’s search results.

Can Bing Pose a Threat to Other Search Engines?

Users aren’t being too judgmental about Bing’s results, even though there may be considerable differences between what Bing and Google return separately. However, when using Bing for a while, you will start getting the feel of what it returns, and the truth is that it has moved strides ahead.

While we don’t have any inside information on Apple’s decision to go with Bing, you can only assume the reasons.

Many people have in fact been using Bing with considerable success on PCs, tablets and laptops. Over the past few months, it appears that their quality has improved. It may not have all the extra offers that Google makes, but the results are the most important thing for now.

According to recent views from Microsoft, officials, it appears that they are confident that they can compete with other search engines for “search quality”. You can make out that the company has in fact been making extensive efforts to improve and monitor its search result quality because it launched a “Bing Search Quality Insights” series last year, explaining what it’s trying to do in order to improve its search quality.

Microsoft Shares Its Intentions with Customers

Microsoft continues to express its efforts, and their latest posts emphasize ongoing improvement with tremendous focus on techniques to ameliorate their search result quality. Some techniques that they have been working on include “optimized interleaving”, consisting of a combination of result lists and tracking clicks that ameliorate relative quality of search results.

Microsoft also posts highlights regarding their findings in a research paper. This was presented at the WSDM-2013 conference in 2013, sharing what they have been doing and letting people know where they are going.

Experts within the company will admit that there is probably no standard for measuring the quality of search results, but the important thing is that searches must return results that serve a user’s purpose.

Microsoft knows that it is on the right track of course because the machine-learning systems that propel Bing’s back end are already entirely capable of managing tasks such as determining and interpreting search intent, rectifying spellings of queries, filtering out junk pages and ranking indexed pages. There are many other things that Microsoft is doing to improve its search engine performance, and it seems that it won’t be very long before Bing emerges as a considerably strong search engine competitor.

[Image via kays]