[ad_1]
Credit: Microsoft
In 2018, Microsoft unveiled its plans for a unified search experience across Windows, Edge, and its Office apps. Since then, the company has been completing the pieces of that experience, which it called “Microsoft Search.” In December of this year, Microsoft is available to deliver a number of missing components that make up the core of its unified search strategy, so it feels like the perfect time to explain Microsoft’s search.
What is Microsoft Search? Microsoft Search is a combination of technologies designed to bring together the results of the intranet and the Web into a series of Microsoft products and services. It’s a new unified search approach that Microsoft first publicly announced in 2018.
Where did Microsoft Search come from? What is your story? Microsoft has been operating several different search platforms in addition to Bing, for years. It had SharePoint search, Outlook search, Windows search, and more.
In 2008, Microsoft bought Fast Search & Transfer, based in Oslo, Norway. Fast’s technology became the core of what is now known as the Microsoft Graph.
The Fast Team pioneered the ability to tailor the types of searches users could do with the indexing and personalization that Microsoft built into SharePoint Search. In 2014, Microsoft unveiled Delve, its in-house search and presentation app. Delve was the first public instance of Microsoft Graph, its centralized application programming interface (API). Behind the scenes, Microsoft was gathering its various search engines and focusing them on the Microsoft Graph and the activity around people.
What is the relationship between Microsoft Search and Bing? Microsoft teams working on Unified Search have embraced core capabilities developed by the Bing team, such as how to talk about a topic without having a particular topic word in a query. In 2017, Microsoft announced “Bing for Business,” a precursor to its comprehensive Microsoft search strategy. Microsoft’s thinking: Bring search to where users are instead of having them go to a specific site or app to search.
Today, Microsoft customers who are signed in to their Microsoft 365 / Office 365 work accounts will see web and work search results when they access Bing.com. They’ll see listings (which only an individual user will see) for their work calendar items, people / colleagues, files, groups, and organizational information. Administrators have the option to enable or disable this ability for users in their organization.
In early 2020, Microsoft announced plans to forcibly install Bing search extensions on Chrome for Office 365 ProPlus users. Microsoft officials apparently believed that this ‘Bingjacking’ would help Microsoft Search become more widely adopted in its user base. After some feedback from customers, Microsoft relented and reconsidered its plans on this front.
Will Microsoft Search Finally Impersonate Bing? No Bing will remain Microsoft’s web search offering. Microsoft Search will be the unified search offering for the Intranet. The two search pillars will likely continue to share techniques and technologies where appropriate. Microsoft Search and the underlying Microsoft Graph are intended to help understand the working lives of users (documents, entities, people they regularly work with, etc.). Bing’s primary focus is to provide an understanding of the world outside of an organization, with acronym and entity extraction, machine reading comprehension, computer vision and other tools and technologies, officials say.
For which Microsoft products and services does Microsoft Search already exist? Microsoft search boxes and job results are now accessible through a number of Microsoft products, including SharePoint applications, Outlook, OneDrive, and Office.com. Microsoft Search is designed to work on Windows desktops, but also on mobile versions of Office applications.
At this year’s Ignite, Microsoft also announced that it is developing a separate Microsoft search service that can connect to users’ applications and data platforms. (Private preview of Standalone Search is coming soon.) The standalone solution is an option for customers who are not all in the cloud and are not heavy Microsoft 365 / Office 365 users, but can still benefit from Microsoft Search. “Microsoft 365 subscribers can index external content using our Graph connectors, available from Microsoft and our partners to display that data in our native applications (eg SharePoint, Office, etc.). The standalone solution uses the same connectors for indexing external data “. officials said.
Speaking of third-party content, can Microsoft Search provide search results on non-Microsoft products and services? Microsoft Search indexes users’ Microsoft 365 data. With Microsoft Graph connectors, companies can also index third-party data to appear in Microsoft search results. Third-party data can be hosted on premises or in public or private clouds.
What’s Next on the Microsoft Search Roadmap? The Microsoft 365 roadmap is more of a marketing tool than a true engineering roadmap. But even if the roadmap is only partially accurate and complete, December 2020 will be a very important month for Microsoft Search.
Among the dozens of new Microsoft Search features listed as December deliverables are the Microsoft Search page coming to Teams; integration between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Search; Microsoft search results available in Office Mobile; a public preview of semantic search, which will focus on better understanding the intent, meaning and context of users in their searches; and Microsoft Search integration with Windows Search.
What will Microsoft Search look like on Windows? There is already a search engine in Windows, which users can continue to use to find applications, documents and files, emails, and web results. Starting in December, when Microsoft Search is integrated with Windows Search, the results that users will get when using the search box in Windows will show more relevant results, to help users find people, emails, documents and more.
What is the relationship between Microsoft Search and Project Cortex, Microsoft’s knowledge management technologies? Project Cortex, as Microsoft originally envisioned it, was configured to be a centralized knowledge management service. At Ignite 2020, Microsoft officials explained that due to customer feedback, Cortex would be delivered as a set of complementary services, rather than a single service, starting with SharePoint Syntex, the artificial intelligence content, and the understanding piece. of Cortex.
Microsoft Search is people-centered, as officials like to say, which means that many of its search results are based on the people with whom customers interact. Microsoft Search will help users find experts within their organizations who focus on particular topics. And responses to topics / topic cards, another key piece of Cortex, will likely appear via Microsoft Search starting in December 2020.
(Thanks to Dan Holme, Microsoft’s Director of Product Marketing, Productivity, and Next-Generation Usage, and Naomi Moneypenny, Director of Product Development for Project Cortex for their help with this explainer.)
