As we continue to explore Azure Government and the recent addition of their popular Cognitive Services, it’s worth noting how comprehensive this service is. We’ve looked into government applications for their Vision, Language, and Speech features. Now it’s time to look beyond the general categories and into something seemingly easy: Search.
Microsoft is extremely deft in integrating other media properties into Azure Government. When you take advantage of Cognitive Services, one tool you’ll have available is Bing.
If your government office already uses Bing often for searching online, you’re going to find it extremely useful in the Search function. For building apps, you’ll be able to incorporate an effective search tool. However, you can use search in other ways to make your government operations run more efficiently.
Finding Web Documents Through the Bing Search API
The Bing Search API is extremely comprehensive, and it’s easy to incorporate it into any government app you’re developing. For users of your app, they’ll easily find any web document online in seconds.
It’s easy to arrange your search based on result and answer rankings. You can even customize the document search based on location or user market.
Safe search features help keep the document search private if you’re doing an internal search for a secret source.
All of this is possible through machine learning technology enabling spelling suggestions and related queries for more intuitive searching.
Finding Imagery
The Search platform includes one of the most comprehensive image search features you’ll find. You can help a user find everything from thumbnails to image metadata.
Through Image Insights, you’ll allow further intuitiveness like machine-generated captions or related image searches. You can include image search filters to narrow search down even more.
Bing keeps track of trending images across the web as well so you can find appropriate imagery to include in a news bulletin.
Searching for Videos
Users of your app (or employees in your office) may need to find pertinent videos in your database, as well as in cyberspace. The Bing Search API gives you enhanced video results with metadata for more detailed info.
Plus, you’ll be able to see video preview thumbnails, something you can’t always find on other search engines.
Filters and trending video searches are available, just like with images. It’s possible to use this for government training if you keep a video library in an online database.
News Searches
Your government employees may need to search for news headlines to keep up on what’s happening globally, or for posting on your website when a critical event occurs.
Searching for news is easy through the Bing API since it helps you categorize, as well as gather what’s trending internationally.
Employing this into a government app can help users find related stories to your agency and perhaps help find faster solutions to a problem. Even if it seems everyone relies on Google to search for everything, Search in Cognitive Features works in a smarter way with better targeting and real-time capability.
Auto-Suggest Searches
No doubt you’ve searched on Google and seen how they use auto-suggest features based on cumulative search information. Microsoft improved on this by giving you suggestions as you type.
It’s another example of how intuitive machine learning can become and in making searches more like a human brain. Now your employees or app users don’t have to type so much to find what’s needed.
In government, this becomes a major time-saver, including finding information faster without having to think about keywords. During moments when lives are on the line, finding data quickly means living up to expectations from the public.
More Information
Keep reading us here at cFocus Software Incorporated as we continue looking at practical features in Azure Government and Office365 Government.