Microsoft and Encyclopedia Britannica have joined forces in an attempt to make Bing a smarter search engine.- The partnership hopes to deliver “relevant information in a more organized way to help you find what you need more quickly and get stuff done,” says Franco Salvetti, principal development lead of Bing.
- “The search engine’s answer feature tries to provide users with a snippet of useful information related to their questions and keywords without having to visit a webpage,” reports TechCrunch. “Results from Encyclopedia Britannica will now feature a thumbnail and some useful facts about the topic (as well as links to Wikipedia, Britannica, Freebase and — for those who don’t like to read — Qwiki).”
- The posts suggests Microsoft’s plans are similar to the goals of Google’s Knowledge Graph project, but notes that “Google’s project is far more complex and ambitious.”
- “Indeed, in some ways this partnership with Encyclopedia Britannica feels like a poor man’s version of Google’s project,” comments TechCrunch. “Google’s Knowledge Graph knows about 500 million entities and how they relate to each other. While it’s probably not quite fair to compare this directly to Britannica Online, its worth noting that the old-school encyclopedia features ‘just’ 120,000 articles.”
