Predictive, adaptive, semantic search. It’s that holy grail wherein a search engine will know that, if you input the word barbecue, you really mean recipes instead of the history of grills. While search has gotten exponentially more intelligent over the years, there are still areas in which it fails and semantics is just such an area.
The team at Bing, however, thinks that it has the answer in a new product called Adaptive Search. Adaptive Search will take into consideration your user behavior, then tailor your Bing results to be most appropriate. So if you’ve searched for a word then clicked on a specific site previously, Bing will predict that it’s likely that what you’re searching for falls into the context of that site, thus it can provide you with results that are more tailored.
Granted, this is likely oversimplifying an incredibly detailed process, but that’s the gist of how it will work.
The obvious problem here is that sometimes you really do want to know the history of barbecue grills. So when a search return is being patterned, and you are looking for something that would break away from your normal behavior, you can find yourself trapped into a bubble of personalization.
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Almost as psychic as Bing’s Adaptive Search results might seem, the Bing team knows that you will sometimes look for things in a different context. It’s with that in mind that we’re being assured that different intents will still be available to you on the page.
Want some more insight? Check out the video, then let us know your thoughts.
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