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The new Microsoft Search is smarter and will work across Office 365, Bing, and Windows

By Koh Wanzi - on 24 Sep 2018, 9:00pm

The new Microsoft Search is smarter and will work across Office 365, Bing, and Windows

If you search on Bing, you’ll get both web and organizational results like documents you've recently worked on. (Image Source: Microsoft)

Microsoft is introducing upgrades to its Search feature. The company first rolled out personalized search across its Office 365 apps last year, but the new Search will now encompass data both inside and outside of Microsoft 365.

By utilizing AI technology from Bing and personalized insights gleaned from Microsoft Graph, Microsoft says it has come up with a more powerful tool for workers to access their organization’s network of data.

This means more cohesive and coherent search capabilities that will form an integral part of how you use Microsoft apps. Search is now moving to a more prominent place across multiple apps, including Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, Sway, and OneNote. The search bar will also be in the same place across desktop, mobile, and the web to ensure a more consistent experience.

This applies to mobile apps like SharePoint and Outlook, both of which are available for download today.

In addition, the search bar will learn how you use it and surface more relevant results when you click it, such as the people you most frequently share documents with.

The search box also provides a new way of interacting with the app in question. For example, you’ll be able to quickly search for and access specific commands instead of having to manually pore over the various toolbars.

Search on Office.com will surface the same results as on Bing. (Image Source: Microsoft)

On top of that, search results will include results from across your organization. This means that you can find other Word documents within Word itself, in addition to a presentation you were working on before. In the latter scenario, you can either navigate straight to that presentation or choose to incorporate slides from that file directly into your existing document.

This search experience extends outside Office 365 apps as well, and you’ll have access to it on Bing.com (you’ll have to sign in with your Office 365 account first), Microsoft Edge, and Windows.

If you search on Bing, you’ll get both web and your organizational results, so you can check out a broad overview of the documents, conversations, and web results relevant to your search. The same search scope will be available in Microsoft 365 itself, and search on Office.com will see a targeted release today.

Microsoft Search in Windows and its Office apps will arrive sometime in the first half of 2019. 

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