• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 24, 2013

As the pace of technology changes, search will continue to accelerate. Now, with a deeper connection to Xbox One, Microsoft will sink more money and resources into building out Bing services, which provides the responses when using voice search. Total conjecture on my part, but it makes sense. Here's why.

Xbox generates revenue for Microsoft. Revenue in the Entertainment and Devices Division rose in the three months ending March 31, 2013 compared with the year-ago quarter, according to the company's SEC filing. The 10-Q explains that EDD revenue increased primarily from higher Xbox 360 platform and Windows Phone revenue and content royalties. The Xbox 360 platform revenue increased $641 million or 55%, primarily due to the recognition of $380 million of revenue related to the Video Game Deferral and higher Xbox LIVE revenue.

In May 2012, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft CMO for the Interactive Entertainment Division, told us that since 2005, when Xbox 360 launched, the company sold 67 million consoles generating more than $56 billion at retail.

"When you search by voice for movies, TV shows or music, Bing is the service providing the instant responses," and that experience will "get a whole lot better with Xbox One," complete with Skype integration, according to Frank Shaw, Microsoft corporate VP of corporate communications. Bing parses natural language commands through a mixture or technology from the Tellme acquisition, and social graph information from Satori, Bing's answer to Google's Knowledge Graph.

As Xbox gets a technology lift, so does the Bing search engine. On Thursday Microsoft's engine announced changes to search features on Bing News, from trending and related topics to expected indexed searches from two weeks to years.

Tim Leung, Bing principal group program manager, explains in a blog post that the changes were made possible by working with Satori, the technology that enables Bing to have a deeper understanding of the people, places and things around us and the relationships between them. Satori is Bing's answer to Google Knowledge Graph.

Top news results from across the Web serve up in a visual carousel that allows searchers to explore important and timely topics related to the specific people, places or things.

Bing also announced the release of Bing XML Sitemap Plugin 1.0, an open-source server-side technology that generates XML Sitemaps compliant with sitemaps.org for Web sites running on Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server as well as Apache HTTP Server.

Last week, Bing revealed a faster way to find people in Autosuggest. This week the engine introduced a feature for news vertical related to exploring information about people, places and things in a visual carousel format.