Redmond, Washington — Google wannabe Bing now knows a little bit more about where you are, and where you have been. Software monopolist Microsoft over the weekend announced several updates to its Bing search engine aimed at offering more personalized search results on Bing, tailoring results to the user’s particular location and search history.
“Personalized search is not the latest, but Bing is applying a different strategy, focused on the type of search a person is doing and understanding more about what that person is likely searching for,” a spokesperson for Bing said in a statement. “As no two people have the exact same search behavior, Bing has taken the extra step to automatically tailor search results,” the spokesperson added.
Earlier, according to a blog post from Microsoft, the company has initiated a limited tests involving personalized Bing results, but this is the first time it has rolled out personalized results to everyone on the search engine.
For example, this means now if you are searching for something like a pizza place in San Francisco, in the past you would have to type [San Francisco pizza]. Microsoft said Bing will now tailor your search results based on physical location and now you can simply search for [pizza] and Bing will serve results for restaurants in San Francisco.
“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 are moving 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.”
“Our study shows that users commonly re-issue such navigational queries and the intent of that user rarely changes,” the post continued. “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.”
The biggest hindrance 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 personalized is that, to date, personalized search ‘can not see the forest for the trees,'” Microsoft wrote. “In other words everyone is collecting everything and trying to figure out the peculiarities of human behavior from a mass of digital bits. To an extent, we have all been looking at the wrong inputs which in turn have not given us the output we want.”
The company stated that it is now experimenting with a number of tests to ascertain “which methods deliver the best results for a given user behavior,” and today’s updates are just the beginning.
Google has long offered location-based personalized results. In March of last year, the company said it was customizing one in five searches, tweaking results according to a user’s location, web history, and online contacts, such as Gmail. Again, in October, the company simplified location settings to make them a little more straightforward.
Microsoft is not yet customizing based on contacts, but it appears the company is at least experimenting with such results. Microsoft says both features are currently available only to Bing users in the U.S.