Bing will now present snippets of Reddit comments for certain queries that don’t have black and white answers.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine is partnering with Reddit to bring more detailed answers to your queries.
Questions like “Why won’t my water boil?” or “How accurate is the TV show Band of Brothers” will return with snippets of Reddit conversations that Microsoft is betting can offer more insight over typical search results.
When it comes to famous figures, Bing will show you Ask My Anything Q&As the person ever did over Reddit. It’ll also display any upcoming AMAs for that person too.
The features, which go live on Wednesday, are part of the search engine’s efforts to address more complicated questions that don’t have clear black and white answers.
Microsoft tapped Reddit, which has a huge library of content produced from 330 million users — many of whom are constantly debating various topics.
Although search engines are built to find content, that mission gets trickier when a question has multiple answers, said Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
Fortunately Reddit users are routinely upvoting the best comments and downvoting the worst ones on numerous detabable questions, he said. Now the site wants to bring that content to more internet users through Bing. For instance when Bing users search for “Why won’t my water boil?” they’ll get expert comments made on Reddit from a chemist and a chef.
“We can make both our platforms better,” said Ohanian, who acknowledged Reddit’s user interface isn’t the prettiest. He’s hoping Bing will introduce more internet users to Reddit’s various online communities.
The enhancements to Bing don’t stop there. The search engine is also flexing its AI-powered computer muscle to pull from additional expert sources to answer other complicated questions.
For instance, if you query “Is cholesterol bad?” Bing will show you two different perspectives taken from reputable medical websites with the goal of telling you the benefits and drawbacks to cholestoral intake.
To find the appropriate perspectives, Bing is using neural networks —AI-driven computer systems based on human brains— to search for possible answers across multiple authoritative sources.
Bing also wants to break down the search results in user friendly ways. It’ll do so with easy-to-read tables that, for instance, can compare Pilates versus Yoga. Or it’ll tell you that Pakistan is about twice the size of California, as opposed to simply saying it covers an area of 307,000 square miles.
“Often people are seeking answers that go beyond something that is a mathematical equation,” said Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s vice president for AI products in a statement . “We want to be able to frame those opinions and articulate them in a way that’s also balanced and objective.”
Microsoft showed off the new features at a San Francisco event revolving around AI advancements, some of which are also coming to other products including virtual digital assistant Cortana .
Starting next month, Cortana will be able to sort emails across Outlook and Gmail, and offer voice-spoken summaries of the most important ones. In addition, Microsoft has included a new feature in Cortana called “skills chaining,” which will trigger other functions Cortana can perform for certain requests.
For example, if you buy tickets for an event through Cortana, the assistant will suggest you also place a reminder about the event in your digital calendar.
