Bing Insights Integrated Into Microsoft Office Word Online

Bing announced on the search blog and the Office blog that they’ve integrated Bing search deeper into their online Office Word product.

Office Word Online has a new feature named “Insights,” which is powered by Bing search. Insights understands what you are writing in your document and when asked, will show you factual information about your words, directly in the Insights box on the right hand side of your screen.

Insights pulls data using Bing from sources like Bing Snapshot, Wikipedia, Bing Image Search, Oxford English Dictionary and the web. It is smart enough to know the difference between Jaguar the car and the football team and the animal, based on the words you have written in your document. Thus showing you the proper answer box on the right side Insights section.

Here are some examples of how it looks like in Office Word Online:

Ryan Gavin, Microsoft, GM, Bing Product Management said:

Bing indexes and stores entity data from around the web representing real world people, places and things. Insights for Office utilizes Bing’s ability to index the world’s knowledge and our machine learned relevance models to semantically understand the most important content in a user’s document and then return the most relevant results. This capability is derived largely from patterns of text analysis developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research. The results deliver the most relevant web links, images, etc. for a given request in the form of entity cards – a quick overview of the most important attributes (description, date of birth, etc.) about a real world person, place or thing. In many cases, the entity card may provide enough information for the user’s query intent to be fulfilled without requiring any additional exploration. If the user wants to dive deeper, they can click on “More quick insights” and “More web results” to get even more detailed search results.

How does this work? Right click on content in your document and select “Insights.”

The Insights box will then appear on the side of the screen.

You can try this yourself over here.