Microsoft on Thursday announced several updates to its Bing search engine intended to provide more personalized search results.
First, Microsoft said Bing will now tailor search results based on physical location. Rather than type in "Pizza in Seattle," for example, type "Pizza" and Bing will return results in the Seattle area automatically.
"As 76 percent of people use search engines to plan trips, events or social gatherings, Bing Local has always provided you with maps to nearby business listings, authoritative reviews and areas of interest," Microsoft said in a blog post. "Starting today, we're going a step further with new improvements that take into account where you are and serve locally relevant information directly in the body of the results page."
Second, Bing will now remember previous searches and push to the top the results for which it believes you are searching. The company used "ACS" as an example. Overall Bing search results might list the American Cancer Society above the American Chemical Society. But if you have searched for "ACS" in the past and clicked on the American Chemical Society, Bing will remember that and place the Chemical Society higher than the Cancer Society in your future Bing results.
"This new personal search feature uses this human behavior as its core premise – if Bing thinks a user is trying to 're-find' a site, the relevant result is promoted to the top position on the page," Microsoft said.
The biggest obstacle is serving up personalized search results, Microsoft said, is that human behavior is not predictable.
"We think one of the challenges with delivering results which are truly individualized is that, to date, personalized search 'can't see the forest for the trees,'" Microsoft wrote. "In other words everyone is collecting everything and trying to figure out the foibles of human behavior from a mass of digital bits. To an extent, we've all been looking at the wrong inputs which in turn haven't given us the output we want."
The company said it is now testing a number of experiments to determine "which techniques deliver the best results for a given user behavior," and today's updates are just the beginning.
Google has offered location-based results for some time. In October, the company simplified location settings to make them a little more straightforward.
Earlier this week, Experian Hitwise reported that searches conducted on Bing increased 21 percent in January, though Google and Yahoo held on to the top spots in terms of search engine share. That came as Bing and Google were engaged in a public battle over search results. Google recently accused Microsoft of copying its results in Bing; a charge Bing vehemently denied.