The crowd was growing anxious for the conference to start and our fearless leader, Ben Lloyd of Amplify Interactive and President of SEMpdx, took the stage to introduce the keynote speaker; Stefan Weitz. Stefan is the Director of Bing at Microsoft and was generous enough to come and make an appearance at SearchFest 2010. His presentation was prefaced with the statement that he was a little biased towards the Bing product, understandably so as he is the man in charge. So began the demonstration of the power of Bing.
According to Stefan Weitz’s presentation half of the time spent in search is spent on a few longer sessions, this being the majority of search behavior. Another interesting set of statistics are that 42% of search sessions need refinement and 25% of searches led to hitting the back button, the single most common behavior in searchland. With this in mind, he began to dive into the concepts surrounding Bing.
Stefan described four the four elements of Bing. Bing is known as a Decision Engine, not a Search Engine. This is the case as Bing is intended to guide the user through the complex array of search results by adding context and relevant perspective to the intention of the actual search. Bing is also known for the basics, still a focus of Microsoft, having never been forgot. This is impressive if you think about it as it is intended to be the next step in Search itself. Bing is designed around the navigation and sorting of the complex network of results, similar to the first element. Finally, is the element of decision making and allowing the user to make a more intelligent choice rather than havign to use guesswork as a foundation for finding relevant results.
Following the introduction to the philosophy of Bing came a prediction of where Microsoft believes the internet is headed. The first revolution in the internet is the notion that the web is becoming a place of objects instead of text and hyper links. With an increase in multimedia, such as video and images, there is a need to collect, categorize and create context for these objects. From this comes the second prediction for the future of the internet, Spatial Search. Spatial Search refers to the ability to create the context and perspective that is needed to relate these objects from the internet to the outer-world. The third prediction that Microsoft is making for the future of the internet is the ability to finally realize a Semantic Web.
The example given was Siri, the iPhone App (ironically enough an Apple product) that allows you to seamlessly link your queries in real-time through voice and location-based context. Here is the video that was used to demonstrate the power of Siri.
From Semantic Modeling came the fourth and final prediction about the internet’s future, Mobile and Augmented Reality. For this specific prediction, Stefan used a TED Talk that was given recently about the use of real-time image input onto Bing’s Mapping System. Here is that video
As time was beginning to run short, Stefan hurried to make his final statements about both Bing and the Internet. He stated that Bing was the next step forward in Search Engines and was designed around helping users make decisions, thus referring to it as a Decision Engine and not a Search Engine. All in all, I was very impressed by Stefan’s presentation and was actually able to interview him quickly before the batteries in my recorder died. To hear the recording simply go to www.getinsyght.com and stream or download the episode. The conference was off to a great start.
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