Bing has announced a partnership with Britannica Encyclopedia, to give more relevant information for certain search queries in the search page itself.
This means using Bing, I could quickly find out some simple details about certain famous people or even certain things like a plant, animal or place. This sounds a lot like Knowledge Graph which was introduced by Google few days ago.
I decided to check out what Bing is offering with its tie-up with Encyclopedia Britannica. Below is the search result for a search term and I have highlighted the Britannica entry in the results.
Few things that stand out is that the link is not exactly at the top, which would have been very useful.
I carried out more search queries and found that Wikipedia entries almost always show up above the Britannica ones. It also has a lot less information that Google Knowledge Graph shows as you can see in the image below.
Google shows its Knowledge Graph results more prominently than Bing is showing up Britannica results. I wonder what exactly Bing is trying to do here but fixing these results at the top could be a good start as users are more like to actually look them up.
Interesting to note that Google tends to rely quite a bit on Wikipedia for its Knowledge Graph content while Bing has decided on Britannica. It is well known that Wikipedia was pretty much responsible for the decline of Britannica Encyclopedia’s printed editions.
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