The usefulness of search engines does not end upon clicking the ‘search’ button. As millions, even billions of searches are carried out, the requests for information become information themselves, data to be analysed and utilised in order to better tailor products and services to the end user.
Bing is Microsoft’s search engine offering, and Redmond is clear in its intentions: it wants to challenge Google at its own game. And, to help achieve this, it has now announced the availability of Bing’s knowledge and action graph API for developers, as revealed on an official blog post. This will allow those making apps to better utilise the ‘rich data’ capabilities of the service, bringing relevant information to their users far more quickly than might have been possible before.
By providing the ability to search based on context rather than simple text queries, this also opens up apps for new explorations into how best to tailor user-interfaces for the end consumer.
The post also announced, as we already told you, an update to Bing Search on Android, which now includes the ability to use Snapshots of the knowledge and action graph.
Will you be making use of this API? Let us know in the comments below.
