At the early part of the summer, Microsoft launched its new search engine Bing, also known as the “decision engine.” As Mark Johnson of Bing explains, the search engine tries to determine the searcher’s intent or semantics in order to speed up the decision-making process.

He goes on to say that Bing realizes that searchers are not looking for links from a search engine. Instead, they want to conduct actions. Bing is trying to make this process easier by adding various features to the search experience and by categorizing search results.

The two sides of semantics that Bing is attempting to improve with its search engine are the query side and the document understanding side. On the query side, Johnson says the searcher should not have to speak the language of the engine but should be able to speak naturally. Since there are such a large amount of text documents on the Web, Bing wants to understand these documents better so it can provide better ranks, captions, and eventually, answers directly on the results page.

As Bing progresses in these areas, the engine expects to improve the user interface as well as expand its focus areas beyond travel and shopping. Johnson says Bing has potential to provide a “significantly better user experience over the next few years.”