• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 13, 2017

Microsoft on Wednesday announced a partnership with Reddit to serve community content into Bing search results and offer a series of tools that support marketers.

The partnership, two years in the making, relies on Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (A.I.) technology to deliver what Steve Sirich, general manager on the global search ads business at Microsoft, calls a better search experience for Bing users and brand marketers.

Sirich said the partnership brings an opportunity to index relevant news sources from about 330 million people each month who continue to contribute relevant content to Bing.

Reddit supports more than 2.5 million comments daily across 138,000 active communities. Bing aims to make it easier to surface that content through smarter search results.

The two companies unveiled new products that apply Microsoft's A.I. tools to Reddit’s data. The first is Bing Intelligent Search, which returns Reddit results for AMAs, Questions, and Communities.

The second tool, called The Power BI suite, provides templates to manage and target content on Reddit. It allows marketers to analyze their Reddit footprint and determine how, where, and with whom to engage with in the Reddit community.

As part of the Intelligent Search features, Bing users will see more information about Reddit content within communities across the site.

For example, typing in "reddit" and the name of a community, such as "aww" or "data is beautiful," the relevant subreddits will serve up in a dedicated results section. Bing also will serve some of the top conversations of the day.

Mobile view of Bing’s cross-platform Reddit AMA, or "ask me anything," search experience means if someone types in the name of someone who has done an AMA — let’s say, Dr. Jane Goodall — their past or upcoming AMAs will surface along with additional information about Jane.

Bing will give snapshots of completed AMAs and, for users just searching for “Reddit AMAs” in general, a carousel of popular AMAs. The search engine will also serve up queries best answered in conversations.

The partnership also ties in Reddit's relationship with Socialgist to bring in data and API to Power BI, a set of business modules that use Microsoft’s technology that helps marketers analyze data and share insights.