Bing Shopping Goes Semantic
March 5, 2011
We think that Microsoft has aced the GOOG in online shopping search. Is the technology under the hood from Powerset or Cognition Technologies? We are not sure. You will want to read “Bing’s Shopping Search Gets Smarter with Natural Language Capabilities”. The idea is that when detail about price is entered into a search query, Microsoft narrows the result set to include objects at or below the specified cost. Google Shopping does not. According to the write up:
What’s even more interesting than the feature itself is that Bing is obviously working on adding improved support for natural language queries to more verticals. As the Bing team notes in today’s announcement, “this is just a small step in our journey to make search friendlier to natural language queries, and help you quickly find what you’re looking for.”
Google has NLP technology too. My research suggests that Google will respond. That’s good. What I find interesting is that Google is taking the role of the follower in some areas of search. In others such as social content, Google’s responses have not narrowed the gaps with some competitors.
Google’s controlled chaos may yield innovations but not the prioritization and filtering that makes a service break new ground. I hope I am wrong. Microsoft hopes Google keeps on its present path, allowing Microsoft to nibble away at Google’s huge search lead a bite at a time.
Stephen E Arnold, March 5, 2011
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2 Responses to “Bing Shopping Goes Semantic”
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Shopping is exactly the type of thing that should be semantic. Bing seems to be moving smartly in that regard. And slightly off topic but still slightly related to Google’s current path — if Google and Yelp can’t agree and somehow Yelp is excluded (which is unlikely) from Google search index, Google will be over-playing its hand.
Kimberlee Morrison,
I find that many vendors use the term “semantic” in the way some use “knowledge management” and “business intelligence.” I will do a short post on the problems of explaining certain functions with a buzzword, skipping the definition and the specific use case addressed.
Stephen E Arnold, March 10, 2011