Future of Bing search is pervasive, predictive and proactive, says James Murray, EMEA Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft Bing.
The future of search is a topic of constant interest to those of us working in search marketing and beyond. With growing market share, Bing is in the midst of a change of direction that takes them away from simply emulating Google, and toward their own ideals and technologies that will differentiate them from their rival.
In an interview with Laura Hampton of Impression, James Murray explains how Bing sees the future of search in three key prongs; pervasiveness, predictiveness and proactivity.
“Pervasiveness is about the huge proliferation of devices that people are interacting with search in so many different ways – and not just searching in a destination in a box to see those links that we’ve historically thought of as search,” explains Murray.
“When we get to a stage where search can interact with any device and we can use that to connect seamlessly, that creates a really interesting dynamic.”
Murray gives the example of the internet of things, such as a connected fridge, where the fridge is able to let you know what food you have available and therefore what you can have for dinner. His suggestion is that, depending on the context of what you’re doing, Cortana can make recommendations on what you might choose to eat, simply by being connected to the fridge in that way.
Exploring the idea of predictiveness, he says: “As we start to understanding more information and as we start to personalise that to users, the algorithms are going to be able to learn more about the things that are important to you and the things that are important to me and how that differs, and then to make recommendations on future needs.
“In a world where everything is seamlessly connected and my digital assistant connects with my fridge and also my calendar, Cortana can predictively prompt me and say ‘mum and dad are coming for the weekend, so you’re going to be drinking more tea than normal and you don’t have enough in your fridge’.” he explains.
The final component – the ‘proactivity’ piece, comes from empowering machines to make decisions based on that pervasiveness and predictions.
“When we get to a stage where we’re more confident giving machines the autonomy to take actions on our behalf, we can go to the next stage where we know mum and dad are coming for the weekend, we know that mum only drinks semi skimmed whereas you like full fat, so [your digital assistant can] order you some semi skimmed milk, so that’s just one less thing for you to do.” says Murray, summing up Bing’s vision for the future.
Laura Hampton spoke to James Murray about a range of topics relevant to search and paid advertising – view all Bing Interviews here.
