• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 4, 2019

Microsoft on Monday relaunched Bing as "the search engine for business" by adding new features that allow people to search across the internet and corporate intranets from one interface.

Search in Bing lets those searching for titles, team names, and office location use natural language. It provides floor plans that highlight directions when searching by office location. This ability also is available on mobile search. Definitions for company acronyms also are available, as well as a broad set of question and answers to find internal company information.

Accenture, BA Insight, and Raytion have joined as partners in the Microsoft Graph connectors preview program. It expands the reach of Microsoft Search for Microsoft 365 customers, with the addition of more than 100 connectors including Salesforce.com, ServiceNow, Box and more. They become available in the first half of 2020.

Microsoft Graph connectors integrate external data into the Microsoft cloud into Microsoft Graph services and applications to enhance Microsoft 365 experiences such as Microsoft Search.

Bing’s relaunch, along with the Edge announcement, highlights how Microsoft rebuilt the browser based on Chromium for Windows 10 and macOS.

Privacy, safety and protection were other reasons for rebuilding Bing and Edge. “About 60% of our time on PCs get spent in the browser,” said Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, during the keynote.

Yusuf Mehdi, corporate VP of Modern Life, Search and Devices Group at Microsoft, demonstrated the changes on stage during the Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando. The browser will ship independent from the operating system and could update every four to six weeks, he said.

In addition to running on the Google Chromium engine, Edge will run all platforms such as Apple iOS, Android, Windows 10, and Window 7.

Microsoft will make the browser generally available on January 15, 2020. The browser will support more than 90 languages.

Edge is now twice as fast as before in rendering web pages. Collections is another feature new to Edge, allowing users to save and sort web content, and export it to Word and Excel.

The new Microsoft Edge build on Chromium also blocks trackers and cookies. In an example, Mehdi showed more than 66 trackers loading on to a PC, but the browser blocks about 62 of them.

A new tracking prevention default in Microsoft Edge. We believe you should know who has access to your data and have the control to choose what you share. Microsoft Edge starts with tracking prevention on by default, so you don’t have to take any actions to immediately start having a more private browsing experience. With SmartScreen and Tracking prevention, Microsoft wants to better protect consumers from phishing schemes, malicious software and new types of malware like cryptojacking.