If you search for “cashmere sweaters under $100″ on Bing or Bing Shopping, the search engine now understands what you mean, returning results for products in the category under the price point specified. Microsoft announced the ability to recognize price constraints today, describing the innovation as “a small step in our journey to make search friendlier to natural language queries.”

Similar searches on Google Product Search don’t return appropriate results.

So far, the change will only apply to prices, and only to U.S.-based searches. However, it does work for mobile searches. Mobile searches for products are widely expected to grow, as shoppers in retail stores do price comparisons and look for reviews online.

Microsoft said it has built the engine so that it can be scaled to other natural language queries in time.

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Microsoft: Bing Shopping & Cashback

About The Author: Pamela Parker is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and Executive Features Editor at Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker. See more articles by Pamela Parker

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