Bing - More Instant Answers - Search Blog

January 17, 2006, 05:32 PM by Bing | 18 Comments

When we ask people what they think of our Instant Answers, a common response is “they are great, but I want MORE”. We hear you and recently added about 1 million facts for your querying pleasure.

Here are a few examples:

Baseball stats

Numerous statistics for historical baseball players and teams along with season data for current players.

babe ruth home runs, babe ruth home runs allowed, ichiro suzuki hits 2003, Seattle Mariners attendance 1981

Football stats

Many lifetime and season facts for popular players and coaches.

peyton manning passing yards 2003, shaun alexander yards per catch

Weather facts

Weather statistics for US states and major cities.

average temperature in January in Michigan, rainfall in honolulu

Government officials

Government leaders and world cabinet officials.

defense minister of india, premier of russia

Holidays

Current dates of major holidays and info about how holidays are celebrated.

memorial day in 2006, christmas eve customs

We’re constantly adding new factual instant answers and want to hear your feedback. Notice a problem with existing answers? Looking for an answer that’s not there? Please let us know.

Thanks,

Mark Stumpf
Instant Answers Team

Comments

dan

Posted On January 18, 2006, 04:59 AM

This is very useful.

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www.political-nutshell.com

Chez

Posted On January 18, 2006, 05:24 AM

Free and LEGAL torrents at http://www.datagalaxy.net

Sam Sethi

Posted On January 18, 2006, 07:08 AM

Hi

This is great but anything on thr international market like World Football (Soccer) or UK/Europe specific. Why not make this open to any developer to create the cotnent and then you would have an open platform with lots of datasources?

Sam

Michael

Posted On January 18, 2006, 08:33 AM

Um, are you aware that there's an entire planet outside of the United States??

- Michael

Derek

Posted On January 18, 2006, 09:34 AM

Excellent stuff!!

You guys are doing great work.

Michael, c'mon. I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of answers available about all sorts of places around the world.

Didn't you see the examples above about government officials? Those aren't US-centric.

I'm sure that's just one international example amongst many.

Besides, search.msn.com is the US arm of MSN search, so even if it were totally US-centric (it's not), it would be understandable.

Great stuff, guys!

Derek

Search Engines Web

Posted On January 18, 2006, 03:12 PM

This is a helpful resource, but it is an interesting footnote about the priorities of Society Today, when you have many Sports Instant Answers,

but :LOL when doing a query for winners of Nobel Prize Categories for specific years - NO INSTANT ANSWERS

Perhaps more academic oriented Instant Answers could be considered.

Jim

Posted On January 18, 2006, 07:36 PM

Just out of curiosity, how do I get the weather forecast? Seesm you missed that one. I've blogged about the sports scores and games, that really rocks. (I think your still missing the NHL though, you might add that too.)

Michael Griffiths

Posted On January 19, 2006, 02:37 AM

Nifty.

Small problem I've noticed: You don't do HISTORY very well.

Sure, I can get the Vice President of the USA NOW, but what if I want the Vice President of the USA in 1979?

You can do "Who was the 21 President of the USA?" and spit out Chester A. Arthur. But not "Who was the president of the USA in 1881?," which should yield the same result.

Another niggling problem is weather, I'm afraid. I can't say "weather <<zip code>>" and have it return an answer. I can get some interesting facts like average rainfall or temperature for a small amount of regions, but it's not done via area code - which is a shame, as I know weather.msn.com has all the data rather well presented.

Overall, though, Instant Answers is doing rather well. Continued improvement will make it very compelling indeed.

Serious?

Posted On January 19, 2006, 03:31 PM

This is what the search team spends their time on?

Nektar

Posted On January 20, 2006, 08:40 AM

This functionality is also available in MSN (Windows Live) Messenger by adding the Encarta Instant Answers Answerbot to your Contacts list. The bot's e-mail address is:
encarta@conversagent.com
Unfortunately, not many users know about this service. This is an excellent service and so I want the Search team to consider adding this functionality by default to MSN Messenger. What I mean is to either have the above contact added to everyone's contact list by default or provide an instant answers (search) box in Messenger, instead of having to add the contact manually.

mslover

Posted On January 20, 2006, 12:17 PM

dear sir,
when ur launching a killer alternative to google adsense?u see ppl are eagerly wating for this thing.
do it early ......
we are now tired of other adsense.

arun

Posted On January 21, 2006, 03:52 AM

Quite useful. But UI is quite distracting. I mean
instead of saying Answer : blah blah .., the Ask Jeeves Smart answers feature does a pretty good job in this, showing images and additional relevant statistics. Something like that could be better and moreover i wont confuse the answer as a sponsered listing.

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