Bing’s Shopping Search Gets Smarter with Natural Language Capabilities

If you search for “air jordans under $100” on Google today, you will get a nice list of ten blue links. If you search on Google’s shopping site, you will get quite a few results with prices around $250. On Bing, however, you also get 10 blue links, but more importantly, you also get a link to Bing Shopping where you will find a list of shoes for under $100 – just like you wanted.

Starting today, Bing Shopping will be able understand natural language queries like the one used in the example above. This works on Bing Mobile, as well as through voice search.

Bing’s ability to provide better context for vertical searches than any other search engine has long been among its greatest strengths, whether it’s support for travel search (which just got a nice update in February), smart integration of music-related search results on the main search results page, or today’s update to Bing Shopping.

What’s even more interesting than the feature itself is that Bing is obviously working on adding improved support for natural language queries to more verticals. As the Bing team notes in today’s announcement, “this is just a small step in our journey to make search friendlier to natural language queries, and help you quickly find what you’re looking for.”