Bing reinvents itself as internal search for companies

Microsoft is shifting its search engine Bing from a general-purpose tool to focus on catering to businesses.
By: | November 12, 2019

It doesn’t make much sense to compete with Google when it accounts for more than 90% of all online searches. So Bing has decided to focus on a new user group – company employees looking for internal information.

Companies will now have the ability to create private, internal search results on Bing, so their employees can save time searching for information. A McKinsey report found that managers spend nearly 20% of their working week looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks.

The sorts of internal company searches where Bing wants to corner the market are for queries about office locations, floor plans and specific internal policies (such as what is our parental leave policy?).

While Bing may only account for a small fraction of search engine traffic, it has still built up large amounts of data from being connected to multiple services and apps, that themselves contains lots of information.

The new features will also deliver recommendations about employees who have particular skills and experience, while highlighting current projects employees are working on.