Initially, web search engines were restricted to returning results which were simple pointers to web pages. Modern search engines often include an ‘answer’ on the first page. This might be a block of information about movies (if you searched for movies) or a small map with some restaurant information.
Bing and Google both present this type of result. If you are a skier, you’ll know that before heading out you want to know the condition of the slopes. Searching on Bing for ‘snoqualmie’ or ‘whistler’ does just that:
Google doesn’t have any answer for skiers as far as I can tell. What I did note though was that if certain snow report websites surface in the results, summar data is extracted:
This is a weaker approach, however, as it relies on the site having the right content and ranking as opposed to Bing strong analysis of intention and curration of appropriate answer data.
Bing, with its rich image and video based home page, gets to show its personality, and these answers shouldn’t surprise anyone whose seen today’s video:
BTW, there’s a line at the end of Gosford Park spoken by the head of the staff which goes something like ‘I’m the perfect servant – I know what they want before they know it themselves.’
