Did you ever want to know if a prominent person has ever given a TED talk just at a glance? Well, thanks to Bing’s new Satori upgrades, you can.
Bing announced today that its Satori technology (think Google’s Knowledge Graph) has been updated to provide new info for a wide variety of searches. Some of this stuff has already been done, but a lot of it is new and rather handy.
The first major update to Satori is that it will surface any and all TED talks the person you’re searching for has given. It’s particularly useful for the TED Talk fan, or the student looking for material. Here’s an example:
Somewhat related, Bing will also give you audio clips of famous speeches by public figures when you search for them. For example, a search for John F. Kennedy will now list all of his most famous speeches. The best part is that you can listen to them without leaving the search results page. As an added bonus, any searches for national anthems will now have said anthem for your listening pleasure in the sidebar.
Moving on, searches for universities have also received a major upgrade. Bing will now not only provide the ranking, undergrad population and tuition of top schools, but it will also provide a list of that school’s popular online courses.
Even scientific concepts are not free from the grasp of Satori as it will now give you a snapshot of the theory from Wikipedia alongside other scientific theories that people search for. If using this feature, be careful you don’t end up in a theoretical wormhole and spend 8 hours trying to understand string theory.
For you history fans out there, Bing will now pull a snapshot of a historical event from Wikipedia. It will also tell you when it started and when it ended.
If you want to know more about the people behind historical events or just your favorite movie, you can now do that as well by just hovering over their portrait in the “related people” section of Snapshot.
If you need to know more about an animal that’s not mankind, Satori has you covered as well. When searching for a generic term like “wolf,” Bing will also bring up related subspecies.
If all these related terms and searches just aren’t cutting it for you, you can also straight up ask Bing a question. If it knows the answer, it will display it at the top of the search results page.
On a final note, searches for software and apps will now include download links in the Snapshot area:
[Images: Bing]