Meet the VP for the Information Platform & Experience team at Microsoft. Gurdeep Singh Pall is responsible for vision, product strategy and R&D for Bing. Last week, he shared his valuable insights with an audience of in-house search marketers at SMX Advanced, the annual Seattle symposium that has earned a reputation as the search industry’s most “thought leading” search marketing event of the year (featuring Google’s Matt Cutt’s QnA session among so many others), just last week at Bell Harbor.
What does Bing mean to Gurdeep? More than just Web search — for starters:
Bing is doing great, he says, with lots of partnerships and momentum. Bing search is today part of Windows, Office, Windows Phone, XBOX and MSN — not just the main Bing search site. Pall thinks of Bing “as a platform” covering sight, sound, touch and multimodal, plus intelligent services (“if you like X, you might like Y”), and custodian of the world’s knowledge – people, places, things and action.
To Pall, Bing is about enabling those user search scenarios that happen when the three points of the triad come together: conversational interfaces for mobile devices, recommendations for music and movies, and more.
“I truly believe that the keyboard and mouse will be things of the past,” he says. “We are entering into a new era. The assets that we’ve built with Bing are applicable across all of this.”
Bing Meets Siri
Gurdeep talks about Bing becoming the default search on Apple’s Siri platform.
“We’re very excited about this partnership. It speaks to how far Bing has come. We’ve had APIs which are related to accessing Bing news, Bing images, Bing web search. We have the partnership with Facebook, as you know. This partnership with Apple takes Bing into scenarios which aren’t just typical searches.”
Will people know it’s Bing? “Yes,” says Gurdeep, “there will be branding so people know they’re getting Bing results?”
So now that Apple’s Siri voice search leads to Microsoft’s Bing, Redmond is getting an advanced degree in the human-machine interface
“The more people use their voice to search, the more we’re learning,” says Pall. “People talk naturally when they do voice search. It’s not like the search box where you type short keywords. He also talks about hand gestures that people make when they talk — multimodal input is important. How your pupils are dilated, how your hands are moving are very important signals.
“The challenge of learning voice search is that we have to retrain systems. You can carry over into multiple responses — a dialog with the search engine. It’s an ongoing interaction. People will start to expect dialog and interaction with their search engine when doing voice search.
Siri is very conversational. Do people on XBOX talk to Bing like it’s a person?
According to Gurdeep, “There’s a lot of research in this area. Do you want the search to respond like a friend? Or like Jeeves the butler? When the dust settles, I think there will be multiple models. You give the user a choice and set expectations.”
Even with the new pairing with Apple’s Siri, Bing is still in a fight for market share with Google. Is Gurdeep happy with the adoption growth?
“To see it inch up like it has, has been very gratifying. It’s very hard to make gains. Where we are is good and the team is super energized. It gives us the opportunity to use these new assets that we’ve been talking about.”
How do you get people to change their Google habit?
“I think it’s about educating people about what Bing has become. Getting them to experience it, to see the beautiful experience. When that happens, people go “a ha” and they pick up new habits,” Says Pall. “The second thing is to make sure that Bing is available where new things are happening — like our partnerships with Apple and Facebook,” he adds.
Does Bing’s human brain have a suggestion for Website marketers who want to gain greater visibility on the search engine, including the move to voice search?
“You can specify full-form questions and phrases,” says Mr. Bing. “The one thing I’d suggest websites do is use Schema.org. Structured data is very important.”
How about the mega-trend of search engines for finding entities, not just finding Web pages?
“Humans understand blue links,” says Pall, “computers don’t. But entities help make sense of that. The way you do that is with structured data. There’s a big shift from words and information to understanding entities. [24×7]
