• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 4, 2015

The need to analyze massive amounts of clickstream event data Bing generates daily has prompted Microsoft to form a partnership with Interana, which focuses on behavioral patterns found in searches. The technology will help Bing analyze the growing amounts of event data generated by searches to better understand trends and user preferences, as well as accelerate the speed of innovation. The biggest question for some is why Microsoft has not built its own platform.

While a Bing spokesperson declined to comment on the "why?" Mark Horton, director of marketing at Interana, said the company's technology can process trillions of rows of event data within seconds, depending on the size of the query. It's about "speed to innovation," he said. "Having to wait a day, two or three doesn't allow the company to innovate and validate new ideas quickly."

The executive team at Interana reads like a Whos Who for the tech industry. Ann Johnson, electrical engineer turned cofounder, became fascinated by the way that hardware shapes software. She worked with device physics at Intel and studied at Caltech. Bobby Johnson, CTO and cofounder, worked at Facebook. He wrote open-source software like Scribe and Haystack, and studied at Caltech.

While most data solutions require technical knowledge in order to write queries in a scripting language, Interana does not.

The Bing team initially will use Interana to analyze experiments at interactive speeds for A/B testing, trend analysis, automated reporting, ad hoc exploration and discovery, and sharing knowledge. Cohorts, funnels, metrics and sessions will allow Bing to test and optimize its search engine, measuring how features perform with users.