Dr. Harry Shum introduced a new series of blog posts on the Bing Search blog today, focusing on “Search Quality Insights”. Shum contends that “there has never been a more fascinating or challenging time in the search space”, noting that the data we consume on the web is ever growing, at amazing rates:
There’s more web data created in a single day than in the entirety of 1999. Moreover, the types of data crawled by search engines are evolving in astonishing ways. What started as indexing simple web documents has blossomed into a dizzying array of data types – from rich multimedia content to real-time streams to social conversations, just to name a few.
The series kicks off with a post by Dr. Jan Pederson, Chief Scientist for Core Search at Bing, on “Bing Search Quality Insights: Whole Page Relevance”. Dr. Pederson describes how Bing has evolved from returning a set of 10 blue links to a quite different experience today:
The first thing you would notice is that many of the queries you perform today produce excellent results that would have simply not been possible five years ago. This is a tribute to the continued growth and evolution of the Web coupled with our unceasing focus on core search quality. Second, you would notice that the overall experience is much richer. Bing’s search results today are no longer just web pages; we include videos, images, maps, news items and other media objects, which we call answers.
The blog post series, while not quite reaching the 8,000 word mark set by the Windows 8 blog, does appear to be following in the footsteps of those posts: that is longer form posts diving deeper into a single subject. Do you like this kind of deeper analysis from Microsoft and Bing in their blog posts?