Series introduction
Welcome to a new series of short articles I am presenting about Artificial Intelligence, specifically, in the Azure AI stack. The objective is that you will learn about an Azure-based AI service in no more than one minute and thus quickly get familiar with the entire stack over a short period of time. These are going short, easily digestible articles so let's get started!
What is Bing Autosuggest?
Autosuggest
Autosuggest is when you’re given a pull-down menu of options when you start typing a query into a search engine. Often, you find the query that you want in the menu and select it, thus saving on time. Most search engines have an autosuggest capability.
How does Bing Autosuggest work?
Suggesting appropriate options when a query is typed in is a more sophisticated process than it might at first appear. Bing Autosuggest uses algorithms to predict what people are searching for and these algorithms are fuelled by the millions of people who use Bing every day. Parallel algorithms are also running to filter spam, check for spelling errors and detect adult or offensive content. In addition, Bing Autosuggest uses hundreds of ranking signals to help provide relevant suggestions, such as how many users have submitted these searches and how recently.
How can you use Bing Autosuggest?
If you have an application that sends queries to any of the Bing Search APIs, you can use the Bing Autosuggest API to make searching quicker and easier for your users. The Bing Autosuggest API is a RESTful web service and you can call it from any programming language that can parse JSON and make HTTP requests. It also includes error handling capabilities to identify and diagnose problems quickly.
The API is called each time a user enters a new character in your application’s search box. As more characters are entered by the user the API will be able to provide more and more relevant suggestions.
Find out more,
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/autosuggest/
- https://blogs.bing.com/search/2013/03/25/a-deeper-look-at-autosuggest
- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/bing-autosuggest/get-suggested-search-terms