Bing’s Evolving Local Search by Matthew Hurst.
From the post:
Recently, there have been a number of announcements regarding the redesign of Bing’s main search experience. The key difference is the use of three parallel zones in the SERP. Along with the traditional page results area, there are two new results columns: the task pane, which highlights factual data and the social pane which currently highlights social information from individuals (I distinguish social from ‘people’ as entities – for example a restaurant – can have a social presence even though they are only vaguely regarded as people).
I don’t get out much but I can appreciate the utility of the aggregate results for local views.
Matthew writes:
- When we provide flat structured data (as Bing did in the past), while we continued to strive for high quality data, there is no burning light focused on any aspect of the data. However, when we require to join the data to the web (local results are ‘hanging off’ the associated web sites), the quality of the URL associated with the entity record becomes a critical issue.
- The relationship between the web graph and the entity graph is subtle and complex. Our legacy system made do with the notion of a URL associated with an entity. As we dug deeper into the problem we discovered a very rich set of relationships between entities and web sites. Some entities are members of chains, and the relationships between their chain home page and the entity is quite different from the relationship between a singleton business and its home page. This also meant that we wanted to treat the results differently. See below for the results for {starbucks in new york}
- The structure of entities in the real world is subtle and complex. Chains, franchises, containment (shop in mall, restaurant in casino, hotel in airport), proximity – all these qualities of how the world works scream out for rich modeling if the user is to be best supported in navigating her surroundings.
Truth be told, the structure of entities in the “real world” and their representatives (somewhere other than the “real” world), not to mention their relationships to each other, are all subtle and complex.
That is part of what makes searching, discovery, mapping such exciting areas for exploration. There is always something new just around the next corner.