Search engines have been working on different possible options to attract users in generating more search queries on their sites. Microsoft’s Bing is no exception to the case as it has it is working on increasing the performance and reliability of its Bing search engine, which would be through its Tiger, Cosmos and Scope work in its Online Services datacenters.
The said update is a part of the software giant’s Research roadshow, which was held recently. It had Microsoft officials talking about “Tiger,” Bing’s next-generation index-serving platform. Tiger has been developed jointly by Microsoft’s Search Technology Center and Microsoft Research in Asia, which makes use of solid-state disk technology. This effects improvement in Bing’s search performance and relevance. For Tiger’s completion, LiveSide forecasts that it should be completed by the end of the current year as it started rolling out in August, this year.
Apart from the index server, Bing has many more updates to check in. ‘Cosmos’ stands to be its second best bet after ‘Tiger’ as it is a key component of Microsoft’s search service. It has been a known fact that Softies hate to mention a number of codenames publicly and ‘Cosmos’ is one of them. But the case has had a turn around and recently, the software giant had a number of new job openings for Bing posted, which had a note that the company would be offering opportunities for Cosmos, Scope and the coming indexing platform.
Basically, Cosmos is a cloud storage and computational engine, which has been powering all of Microsoft’s Online Services, including Bing. On the other hand, talking about ‘Scope’, it is the parallel querying capability/language for Cosmos. However, one can note a recent Microsoft job post for Cosmos being described as below:
“At the heart of Bing is Cosmos. We support the Online Services Division analyzing petabytes of data every day, operating at high scale and with high availability for data mining and business intelligence applications. As part of Cosmos, we build a highly parallel querying capability (called SCOPE) that allows front-end customers to focus on solving problems as if they are using a single machine.”
It seems like Microsoft still wants to keep the Cosmos connection under the wraps as some other job posting on their site noted that Cosmos is helping Microsoft perform data analysis on “large clusters of tens of thousands of machines.”
Another job posting was noted as:
“We aim to redefine real-time search and push the envelope on how fast any page anywhere in the world can be indexed. We write software from the ground-up, running across thousands of servers, managing petabytes of data. Our software has to reliably reprocess billions of web documents every day, ensuring that every document gets crawled, joined with the appropriate datasets and then indexed with the correct features. We are chartered with complicated problems such as finding, crawling, processing and serving any interesting and emerging web page in a matter of seconds; It doesn’t matter if it’s a new New-York times article, an posting to Facebook or an update to someone’s personal blog, we want that page in the index the moment it’s available. The problems we have to address everyday range from designing major new infrastructure pieces to debugging web-page(s) not correctly showing up in the search results.”
Microsoft’s connection seems to be deeper than it has been noted as another posting noted that the manpower being recruited for the Cosmos, Tiger and Scope would also have their contribution for detailing on with adCenter, as it read:
“We’ll be helping to build the underlying infrastructure which will power the real-time processing and delivery of Advertisements to all AdCenter properties (including Bing). Hence contributing directly to the bottom-line success of Online Services Division.
Bing had another update recently, noting that it was working on cementing its relationship with Facebook.