Bing: 'Google's search model is failing'

Microsoft's Bing head sees the end of traditional search - The director of Microsoft's Bing 'decision engine' has criticised Google's search service for being outdated and failing to keep-up with the needs of its users.

Stefan Weitz told the Huffington Post that Google's tried-and-trusted algorithm, of providing top results based on how frequently other sites linking back, is now failing users across the world.

"Search itself hasn't changed fundamentally in the past 12 years," said Weitz.

"Traditional search is failing. The standard notion of search, looking at the texts in the page, the backlinks, all that stuff doesn't work anymore."

Social search

Weitz says Bing's approach is to incorporate a more social aspect to search and also anticipate what the user's needs really are to enable them to make decisions more easily and quickly based on the results.

The latest example of this is Bing's incorporation of Facebook's 'Like' system. From this week, sites will be given preferential treatment in Bing's search results if the user's friends have liked that brand or site on Facebook.

"Our mission is literally to deliver knowledge by understanding intent. What that implies is that we understand the web as this digital representation of the real world," Weitz said.

"We've now mapped almost every single square inch of the planet, we know where buildings are, we know who the people are, we know what tasks people are accomplishing - we are literally creating a semantic model, or a model, for everything in the world."