Microsoft expands Bing's AI-powered intelligent search features

In December, Microsoft introduced a slate of intelligent search features for Bing, using AI to surface more, and better, information in search results. Now, Microsoft is following up with several more features and incremental updates that should further round out Bing's intelligent search prowess.

If you're tracking down basic facts about a topic, Bing will now aggregate facts related to your search from several websites so you don't have to manually scour for them. If you want to dive in further, each fact includes a link to its source. In addition to aggregating facts from several sources, Microsoft says Bing will also now provide multiple answers for how-to questions so you can pick whichever is best for your particular situation.

If you're searching for information on a particularly difficult or technical topic, Bing will also now provide definitions for uncommon words. If you're searching for a medical topic, for example, Bing will allow you to hover over unfamiliar words to see their definitions without leaving the page.

Lastly, Bing's new intelligent image search, which allows you to search within an image to find similar images and products, has been expanded to work with more categories. When it shipped in December, intelligent image search's object detection only focused on a few fashion items. Now, Microsoft says it covers "all common top fashion categories."

These features are rolling out now, and should all be available over the coming days and weeks. And if you want to get a peek at some of the tech powering Bing's intelligent search features, Microsoft also provided a look at how it uses Intel's Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) to analyze billions of documents across the web and serve up answers in "less than a fraction of a second."