Microsoft Search, bringing intelligence to your world of information in Microsoft 365 and beyond

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
- Mark Weiser

@williambaer Bill Baer, Senior product manager, Search & AI

For search to work, search needs to evolve, it needs to be interwoven into the products you use every day. Today at Microsoft Ignite we announced new innovation for Microsoft Search to enhance productivity, empower greater discovery of information, insights, and people, and extend the benefits of Microsoft Search to encompass your data across your own content outside of Microsoft 365.

By applying artificial intelligence (AI) technology from Bing to the deep personalized insights surfaced by the Microsoft Graph, we can make search in your organization even more effective. We're also introducing new organizational search experiences into the apps you use every day, including Microsoft Edge, and our vision to connect across your organization’s network of data.

Beyond Microsoft 365

Microsoft Search increases productivity and saves time finding information, whether at work, at home, or on the go. In the workplace, Microsoft Search reaches across all enterprise content and across all entry points with a consistent and familiar user experience.; however, search is most powerful when it brings together information and insights across data sources…

This morning we announced over 100 connectors (Preview) from Microsoft and our partners, BA Insight, Raytion, and Accenture so you can bring your world of information to Microsoft 365, discoverable across its apps and services as well as Bing and Edge. Whether you're looking for people, insights, or information in Microsoft 365 or in ServiceNow, Salesforce, and more, connectors with Microsoft Search allow you to bring your organizational information to Microsoft Search where it can be used within the apps and services you use everyday. We are also previewing a new set of APIs to let developers build their own connectors. To sign up for the preview or to learn more about connectors, visit https://aka.ms/MicrosoftSearch/Connectors.

Tailored to your needs

New Microsoft Search innovation, allows you to make search your own, tailored to your unique needs and requirements. New APIs and customization options enable you to personalize your search experience, whether you're designing a custom search portal or building your own custom applications on top of Microsoft Search.

A new Microsoft Graph search API (Public Preview) will allow you to customize, extend, and develop applications on top of Microsoft Search. For examples and more visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/search-concept-overview.

Later this year we will also deliver capabilities to set up custom verticals, add your own refiners, and use adaptive cards to create your own visualizations in the Microsoft Search result page in Office.com and SharePoint.

In addition to the capabilities Microsoft is adding, we know there are scenarios demanding even higher levels of customizations and flexibility. To cater to these scenarios we are bringing in capabilities so that you may redirect the suite bar search box to a page of your choosing, allowing you to process the query using SharePoint Framework (SPFx) web part via third party and open source web parts, such as the SharePoint Patterns and Practices Modern Search web parts (https://github.com/microsoft-search).

On your custom search result page, you will have the option to hide the suite bar search box, and use your own search box instead, to avoid multiple search boxes in the interface. Next year we will, through a new SharePoint Framework extension, allow you to augment the existing suite bar search box directly with your own web parts, ensuring the suite bar search box being a constant across all experiences.

In summary, we’ll provide flexible out of the box customizations to cover most needs, as well as give administrators and developers the ability to highly customize the experience using the SharePoint Framework.

Smart by design

We’re also making search smarter and more natural. With intelligent, natural language search capabilities in Microsoft Search (Private Preview), you’ll be able to type out your search as if you were having a normal conversation and the engine can better understand the semantic meaning or intent of your search, bringing back the most relevant documents and information. Semantic search with Microsoft Search to improves search accuracy by understanding your intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear to generate more relevant results. Semantic search is available in preview in SharePoint, Office.com, and Bing. Nominate your organization here for the private preview.

Finding expertise has been a constant challenge, both outside and within organizations. Expertise has long been dependent on self-nomination and identification; however, these skills often aren't verifiable or have aged to the extent to which they're no longer relevant.

Available in Q1 CY20 as preview, in Microsoft Search you’ll be able discover instant answers for people results based on their skill matches. Answers are high confidence results that satisfy your intent directly, or help you navigate to your intended result(s) quickly. Answers can be either based on personal, organizational-wide or world content; they can be related to primary content from your current workload such as a file in SharePoint, or could introduce other content from outside of your current workload such as a personal flight answer based on Outlook content appearing in SharePoint.

Finding expertise in Microsoft Search solves the problem of finding people who knows about certain topics in their organization, which is hard today and requires offline efforts. By integrating the people answers in Microsoft Search when searching for specific topics, we can help people connect in business world easily and efficiently. Microsoft Search is an ideal canvas to present people results for topics as it spans across mail, documents, teams, and is common and natural for people to look up topics unknown to them in search bar. In addition to finding expertise, we’re also announcing support for searching on an individual’s attributes. Attribute search makes finding people easier than ever, Using attribute search you can now located individuals based on their unique attributes, for example, searching for Patti the CEO or Nestor in Building in 15.

In our day to day life we come across many acronyms. Some of them are even new to us. The same acronym may have multiple meanings and they may vary from teams to teams. It becomes a communicational barrier, especially for the new employees. Now, with the help of acronyms answer Microsoft users get to know the meaning of acronyms used in their organization.

Ready wherever you’re working

Microsoft Search is designed to meet you where you are, whether working across Microsoft 365 apps and services, Edge, or Bing so that you can discover the same people, insights, and information, naturally, from where you're probably already working.

In addition, we’re bringing new search experiences to Microsoft Search in Bing. A new Enterprise Homepage in Microsoft Search in Bing (available soon in Private Preview) centralizes important enterprise content to save time and increase productivity for people searching at work and with new Enterprise News in Microsoft Search in Bing in the admin center, you’ll find new settings to help set up a company profile and manage services. You can also generate an industry updates newsletter to notify others about the latest news about a company, industry and personal interests. You can also check out the industry news carousel on Microsoft Search on the Bing homepage to read the latest industry news.

In addition to these upcoming capabilities, we also announced that you can now have Microsoft Search on the go when using the Bing mobile app on iOS and Android.

Next Steps

Connect with Microsoft Search at @MicrosoftSearch on Twitter, check out more Microsoft Search resources at https://aka.ms/microsoftsearch, and bookmark our roadmap to keep up to date on the latest Microsoft Search developments.