Today, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Search, a new search experience that"s coming to the company"s apps and services. It builds on top of the features that were announced last year, which allowed users to search for people and information from within their company based on Office 365 and powered by the Microsoft Graph.
That"s being expanded now, as it can search within Microsoft 365, or outside of it. Microsoft says that it"s changing the definition of search, due to decreasing attention spans and "an explosion of data". Now, search will answer your questions and provide you with insights with the goal of, you guessed it, empowering users to do more.
You"re going to see personalized results as soon as you start typing, and that can include anything from people to documents. Those search results will still include your organization"s data, so you might do a search in Word and find a spreadsheet that you need. Ultimately, it"s about a unified search experience across apps and services.
You can try out Microsoft Search today at Bing.com, Office.com, the SharePoint mobile app, and the Outlook mobile app. Beginning in the first half of 2019, you"ll be able to use it in Office and Windows 10, meaning that it will arrive in 19H1, the next feature update to the OS.
While Microsoft is promoting organizational search with this feature, it"s also about bringing the AI that"s in Cortana to other parts of the Microsoft 365 experience. The end goal is to have these things wherever you are, and in whatever Microsoft app that you"re using, with it all being updated on the back end.