One complaint that people always have of search engines, is about their impersonal approach while returning search results. It is a jarring experience when you have to keep changing the search query because as awesome as your search engine may be, it can’t really understand what you are looking for. Bing is doing something to fix that broken model.
Page Zero, a technology that Bing is implementing in its search engine displays suggestion tags in the search box as you type your queries. So suppose you are searching for the actress Michelle Pfeiffer, by the time you have entered her name, you will get a short description about her, and relevant options like image, videos, her biography and filmography. All of this without actually making the search.
In another example, if you search for “massachusetts institute of technology”, Bing displays you a little description about what they are, and some very smart tags like Admissions. This is really amazing, it shows that Bing knows that if you are searching for a college, there is a good change you would want to take admission in it, or know about their admission criteria.
Till now, if you searched for something – suppose the words “Indian Railway”, the search engine will only throw some relevant next-possible-moves suggestions, like seat availability, pnr status etc. But this personalisation and description weren’t there.
This is an intuitive addition from Bing’s part that makes it more smart, and human-friendly. It is worth telling that last year Google introduced Graph Search which on the right side of their search pane displays the relevant graph of the things related to what you have typed. Page Zero looks like a smart advancement of it.
US readers can give it a try starting today from this preview page. The rest of the world is expected to get this feature soon.
