Bing

The technology behind Cortana reflects Bing’s “massive investments toward indexing the real world,” using speech recognition, language understanding and stream processing that, when put together, make Bing more personal, helpful and intelligent, writes Mike Calcagno, Bing partner development manager.

Expanding the volume and scope of the Bing index, there are now an additional 150 million entries encompassing doctors, lawyers, dentists and individual real estate properties. Now when you search for a medical professional, you’ll see a Snapshot of information that includes their specialty, education, location and phone number.

A quick glance at today’s Bing home page and someone from the Northwest might think they’re looking at Oregon’s Crater Lake. But this is a volcanic caldera down under: New Zealand’s Mt. Ruapehu.

Tuesday’s Bing home page took us thousands of miles – and centuries – away with a looping video of fog rolling over the Machu Picchu ruins in Peru.

Now, when you search for driving directions on Bing, you’ll receive more information at the top of the search results page: estimated travel time, mileage and an overview map.

Searching for images can be tough, especially when you’re trying to nail down one with high resolution and the right dimensions. Bing has introduced a new feature that can match an image in a few clicks – without having to go back and scroll through the results pages.

The tools include Search Term Reporting, an evolution of the Search Query Report. “As you may know, that’s something we’ve dedicated to delivering,” writes Stephen Sirich on the Bing Ads blog. “The Search Query Report helps advertisers better manage their search traffic by listing search queries that trigger clicks for their campaigns.”