• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, March 18, 2019

Microsoft Bing emerged from the shadows to share details of some recent updates and upcoming releases.

The company most recently launched an AI Business School that offers a series of case studies and free instructional videos to help marketers, creators and business executives design and successfully implement an AI strategy. The idea is to educate the tech industry, not just search marketers, on some of the upcoming uses for the technology.

The content focuses on four areas: strategy, culture, technology and responsibility. The tools include the ability to evaluate a business’ maturity level, as well as ways to improve the understanding of what the technology can do.

The direct link between artificial intelligence and search hinges on many of Bing’s features. The search engine’s hundreds of ranking signals in its search algorithm, for example, rely heavily on artificial intelligence.

Frederic Dubut, web ranking and quality product manager at Bing, wrote in a Twitter tweet that “a large part of the web ranking team's work is to engineer new features with more predictive power and retire those that have virtually no impact on rankings.”

In a contributed article, Dubut wrote about how Bing breaks down the machine-learning problem known as Learning to Rank and details how to build a web-ranking algorithm.

Within the next two month, Bing will release Campaign Experiments, which functions like a place to test new features and methods and Campaign Level Associations for audience targeting, to manage targeting and inclusion associations at a campaign level and not just at the ad-group level. It works across paid search and native ad campaigns that are running across Bing.   

In the past couple of months, Microsoft made improvements to the Bing Ads notifications and quality score and made updates to its invoicing reports for those running multiple accounts at agencies. Dynamic Search Ads became available to all, along with the automated bidding strategy to help with budget control and direct targeting. Now the report also offers geographic locations from the overview tap without downloading multiple reports.

In the next few weeks, marketers also will begin to see results from the Verizon Media deal as the search engine begins to consolidate traffic from Bing, Google and Yahoo Gemini to increase clicks.