Microsoft has added a new feature to the Bing search engine that lets it maintain context through multiple searches, allowing you to search more conversationally. This means that you can now ask follow-up questions just like the way you'd ask a friend during a chat.
For instance, if you ask "who is the president of the united states", the search engine will show you the answer. You can then ask follow-up questions like "who is his wife" or "how tall is he" without explicitly mentioning the subject of the search, and expect the search engine to answer correctly.
The Redmond-based company explained that Bing answers the questions by combining conversational understanding with its database that contains information about billions of people, places and things.
Rival Google has been offering a similar built-in search feature for a couple of years now, though currently that works only when doing voice searches in Chrome and the company's mobile app.
The new feature is the latest example of the efforts Microsoft has been putting in to make Bing more useful. Back in 2011, the company added a feature which enabled Bing to show a list of your Facebook friends who have "liked" any of the links displayed in search results.
Earlier this year, the company announced that it had added over 150 million entities including doctors, dentists, lawyers, and individual real estate properties, to the Bing Snapshot database.
According to comScore's search engine rankings for the month of June, Bing has a market share of 19.2 percent, while Google heavily dominates search with 67.6 percent use share.