Last year, Bing launched its “Snapshots” feature, which shows direct answers for searches on the results page. The feature was updated in December for people and places, and it looks a great deal like Google’s Knowledge Graph. Today, Bing announced that it has expanded the offering to include more.
“For Bing, search is about more than blue links,” a spokesperson for Bing tells WebProNews. “It’s also about understanding the entities – people, places, things – around us and the relationship between them. With people and places being two of the most common searches on Bing, we want to ensure that whether you’re looking for the details on your new coworker, the official Facebook page of your favorite celeb, or who won best actress in 2010, Bing gives you the answers you’re looking for quickly and in one place.”
Bing’s Richard Qian discusses the changes on the Bing blog. “The underlying technology for Snapshot is designed to develop deep understanding of the world around us not only as a collection of entities (people, places and things) but also the relationships between those entities,” he writes. “Inside the Bing engineering team, we call this technology Satori, which means understanding in Japanese. Over time, Satori will continue growing to encompass billions of entities and relationships, providing searchers with a more useful model of the digital and physical world.”
“Today, we are inviting people to check out Snapshot to experience our expansion of Satori,” he continues. “Since its introduction in June, we have expanded Satori to include a significantly larger number of entities from more domains with a deeper level of understanding about them. They include people, places, and things which are among the most common searches on Bing. So, whether you’re searching for answers about a celebrity, co-worker, animal, geographic location, or man-made structure, Bing helps you understand the world around you by providing at-a-glance answers about the people, places and things you care about.”
Bing’s offering sprinkles in social information from Twitter, Facebook, Klout, and LinkedIn for people. Qian shows examples for “leopard, Abraham Lincoln, Lawrence Ripsher, John Kerry, and Mount Everest.