In one of the most important steps that will give marketers greater understanding of intent in search queries, Microsoft Bing integrated technology often referred to as sentiment analysis, will provide the ability to understand the context of the content, either positive or negative. The engine also has begun to serve up multiple perspectives on the positive or negative topics, which will allow the person querying the information to consider all options.
Is coffee good for you? How many times must I work out weekly to lose weight? So many answers to questions have variables. So, Bing may serve two answers from two different perspectives, allowing the person to decide which is the correct one for them, since there is not one definitive or correct answer to most questions that are asked in searches on the web.
Bing offers clues about what signals they are looking for in sites they rank for intelligent snippets. Here are some of the attributes of the sites they rank:
1. Authoritative and high quality
2. Relevant to the topic
3. Content is easy to crawl and index
4. Good user experience on the web page
The way it works when you type a question:
1. Their Web Search and Question Answering engine selects candidates from web pages.
2. They organize the candidates in clusters to determine similarity and sentiment
3. Bing ranks the most relevant passages from the web pages from each sentiment based cluster
For example, when searching the term “is coffee good for you” on Bing, the search engine will serve up passages as search results that offer two different perspectives on this topic, instead of just one.
Why It’s Hot
The fact that Bing has confirmed they are using sentiment analysis is big news. Google has also announced their intention to add sentiment analysis to their Featured snippets. Sometimes queries can provide incorrect information. Microsoft hopes this multi-perspective approach will improve the experience on Bing. In January, Google said it would use a multi-perspective approach to rid results of bias and a skewed point of view.
Diverse perspectives certainly help to bring a more balanced view of information plucked from the internet and help information seekers obtain a more rounded and well-informed view.