150 Million More Reasons to Love Bing Everyday by Richard Qian.
From the post:
At Bing, we understand that search is more than simply finding information and browsing a collection of blue links pointing to pages around the web. We’ve talked about doing instead of searching and how Bing continues to expand its approach to understand the actual world around us.
Today, you’ll see this come to life on Bing.com in a feature called Snapshot. Snapshot brings together information that you need at a glance, with rich connections to deeper information on the people, places, and things you care about made possible by our deep understanding of the real world. To accomplish this, Bing now tracks billions of entities and perhaps more importantly, the billions of relationships between them, all to get you the right data instantly while you search.
New Entities: Introducing Doctors, Lawyers, Dentists and Real Estate Properties
….
In case you are interested, the “Snapshot” is what ISO/IEC 13250 (Dec., 1999) defined as a topic.
topic: An aggregate of topic characteristics, including zero or more names, occurrences, and roles played in association with other topics, whose organizing principle is a single subject.
Unlike the topic maps effort, Bing conceals all the ugliness that underlies merging of information and delivers to users an immediately useful and consumable information product.
But also unlike the topic maps effort, Bing is about as useful as a wedgie when you are looking for information internal to your enterprise.
Why?
Mostly because the subjects internal to your organization don’t get mapped by Bing.
Can you guess who is going to have to do that work? Got a mirror handy?
Use Bing’s Snapshots to see what collated information can look like. Decide if that’s a look you want for all or some of your information.
Hard to turn down free advertising/marketing from MS. It happens so rarely.
Thanks MS!