Microsoft Search to showcase what’s new and what’s next at Ignite

The evolution of Microsoft’s search has been a relatively complicated matter since the company seemingly sidelined the convention of Cortana as a conduit to Bing Search.

However, with just 20 something odd days away from Microsoft’s corporate developer’s conference Ignite 2019, there is news surfacing that the company may have plans to streamline its messaging behind its various search initiatives.

Microsoft is offering a list of sessions for developers interested in what’s next for Microsoft’s Search story that includes:

SRCH10 What’s new and next for Microsoft search

Get the latest updates on Microsoft Search. Come on the journey to learn how insights, actions, and answers are being built into your everyday experiences across Microsoft 365, Bing, and Edge. See the latest roadmap across all of your experiences, from SharePoint to Office and beyond. In addition, get insights on how to connect external third-party content connectors, customization, and extensibility.

SRCH20 Microsoft Search for the administrator: What you need to know

Learn about the impact of Microsoft Search on you, the administrator. We’ll take you through the inner workings of Microsoft Search and pull back the curtains on the architecture. Then we’ll translate that into practical tasks for search administration that will help you and your organization get the most out of Microsoft Search.

SRCH30 Connect your world of information to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Search: A sneak peek at Micr…

Modern information workers need to find knowledge quickly and easily regardless of where the data resides. Come take a first look at Microsoft Graph Connectors, which will enable users in your enterprise to search over content sources beyond Microsoft 365. You will see how Microsoft and our partners are jointly making Microsoft Search more powerful to benefit your users. We will also show you a simple set of APIs that you can start using for your custom connector development.

SRCH40 Get answers in context with semantic search and natural language in Microsoft search

For human beings, reading comprehension is a basic task, performed daily. As early as in elementary school, we can read an article, and answer questions about its key ideas and details. But for AI, full reading comprehension is still an elusive goal—but a necessary one if we’re going to measure and achieve general intelligence AI. In search applications, machine comprehension will give a precise answer rather than a URL that contains the answer somewhere within a lengthy web page. Moreover, machine comprehension models can understand specific knowledge embedded in articles that usually cover narrow and specific domains, where the search data that algorithms depend upon is sparse. In this session, see and learn about the latest innovation with natural language and machine reading comprehension in Microsoft Search.

SRCH50 What’s new and next for Microsoft Search customization and development

Microsoft Search is an intelligent, enterprise search experience from Microsoft that applies the artificial intelligence technology (AI) from Bing and deep personalized insights surfaced by the Microsoft Graph, to make search more effective for you. In this session, we demonstrate new Graph APIs and how Microsoft Search will let you create and customize rich search experiences around all of your enterprise content, regardless of where it resides. See our roadmap and examples of how to modernize your existing SharePoint-based enterprise search experiences to take full advantage of Microsoft Search.

There will several other sessions in relation to Microsoft Search during the four-day event, but the above list was one handpicked by a contributing member of the Microsoft Search Blog. For anyone interested in other the other related sessions that include, “Getting Started with Microsoft Search in Bing and Edge,” as well as “Hands-on with the Microsoft Search API in the Microsoft Graph,” visit here for the list.

Microsoft Ignite is scheduled for November 4 through the 8 in Orlando, FL this year and should go a bit more in-depth on things Microsoft’s only hinted at in other conferences such as what developers can expect for Office 365, Azure and even second-generation HoloLens development.