Natural Language Search at Bing Shopping

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 21:24:00 GMT

Consumers conducting queries (searching) on Bing Shopping will arguably receive a better (read more accurate) experience thanks to some improvements to how the search engine processes natural language queries - particuarly in regards to prices.

Microsoft has improved how it handles price queries to deliver results (with some help from the Microsoft Research division).

Bing is aiming to detect price constraint in the query and adjust the results to match the criteria the user provides.

Based on a few sample queries it has done that quite well.

For example, if you search for "Air Jordans under $100" on Bing (not Bing Shopping where the experience is even better) here is what you will see on the search results page:

Now compare that to Google results for the same query:

This is a significant improvement for Bing and one definitely worth mentioning to Internet retailers. Google has made significant advancements in relation to indexing and displaying content which uses structured data of late, but it is interesting to see Microsoft/Bing make a move which relies on its own algorithmic processing as opposed to human-powered adjustments ala Google.

'Net Features : natural language search

Natural Language Search at Bing Shopping