Bing Snapshot Grows To Understand People, Places & Things With “Satori” Expansion

Over the past year, Bing’s been steadily growing the “Snapshots” it shows on the right-hand side of its pages. Now, Bing says those are taking another leap to better understand relationships between people, places and things, using an expansion of what it calls its “Satori” technology.

Bing writes on its blog today saying:

Today, we are inviting people to check out Snapshot to experience our expansion of Satori.

Since its introduction in June, we have expanded Satori to include a significantly larger number of entities from more domains with a deeper level of understanding about them. They include people, places, and things which are among the most common searches on Bing.

So, whether you’re searching for answers about a celebrity, co-worker, animal, geographic location, or man-made structure, Bing helps you understand the world around you by providing at-a-glance answers about the people, places and things you care about.

Bing’s Knowledge Graph & Pushing Satori

We’ve already been seeing signs of this coming, including spotting better images of subjects in Bing’s search results earlier this week. More noticeable was how Bing’s Snapshots, launched last May (and more broadly in June), turned into what felt like a Google Knowledge Graph clone this past December.

In that change, Bing Snapshots expanded to include people and landmarks, with a look and feel similar to Google’s Knowledge Graph. So what’s really different about today?

It seems to be Bing putting more emphasis on the whole “Satori” thing, which it has used since last year and talked about; but, now it’s getting even more attention.

The idea with Satori (as with Google’s own Knowledge Graph) is that Bing understands someone like Abraham Lincoln as an “entity” that is connected with other “entities” — people like Mary Todd Lincoln, places or even things like related movies.

Satori’s been in place since last year. Whether this latest expansion works well, or is much different than what’s already been happening, remains to be seen. Here’s the latest rundown on improvements, according to Bing:

People & LinkedIn: With facts now being drawn from with LinkedIn, Bing will show additional people info such as education background, related people as well as have more “people results” appearing.

Famous People: Facebook, Twitter & Klout: In one of those “weren’t they already doing this” things, but apparently not, Bing will be showing icons leading to Twitter, Facebook and Klout accounts for famous people. Interestingly, despite Bing getting and using Google+ data, that service doesn’t get an icon. These icons also seem to inconsistently appear, as the examples below show..

Places: Bing says it will be showing greater information about landmarks, rivers, lakes and mountains, including related info such as mountain climbers.

Things: “Who played Morpheus in the Matrix?” That’s one of many movie-related and other “thing” questions Bing says that its Snapshots can now handle.

Quick Head-To-Head, Bing Vs. Google

Here are a few side-by-sides, Bing versus Google for Jennifer Lawrence:

For Barack Obama:

Notice how unlike Lawrence, Obama has icons showing for his Twitter, Facebook and Klout accounts (and 99 Klout — I’d hope it was pretty high). Notice, also, how Google, which last year came under fire for pushing Google+ info too much into its results, doesn’t show a link to Obama’s Google+ account at all.

And for Mount Whitney:

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