Microsoft adds data about 150 million entities to Bing
More often than not when people “search” for something they are looking for more than an endless list of results related to their query. Consumers want information, quickly. They want to find what they need and act on it: the fewer clicks, the better. Perhaps this is what has fueled Microsoft recent announcement to add data to 150 million new entities in Bing’s entity engine.
The added data includes: real estate listings, information about attorneys, doctors, and dentists. In addition to the entity data, Bing also added additional data to “web activities” which is data about celebrities and web famous people. This is a feature that launched about a year ago.
The data regarding real estate listings come from Zillow and includes basic information about the house. The summary includes the price, the number of rooms, the size, the year it was built, and a short description of the property. It also displays a map of the house’s location, as well as, an image of the house. It cannot really replace the use of a dedicated real estate site, but it does give you a nice overview. It is a bit like the entities have been integrated with the Snapshot and Search features, to give you a more robust overview of what you are seeking.
If you are looking for a specific doctor or dentist on Bing, now, you will see data that has been aggregated from Vitals, LinkedIn, and the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System. According to the Bing blog, it should provide you a Snapshot of their specialty, experience, education, address, and phone number. This should make finding the right medical professional much easier, when faced with narrowing down an endless list of choices.
According to TechCrunch.com, these new features are a rough equivalent to Google’s Knowledge Graph. We will have to wait and see how it does over time and if any more information is integrated into the system, in comparison to Google’s Knowledge Graph.
