Microsoft services get universal search

Microsoft announces Microsoft Search. The company wants to give “search” a more prominent place in its services and offer similar, more comprehensive functionality in Office 365, Windows, Bing and other products.

Microsoft Search should not only answer questions, but also provide personalized suggestions and enable actions on tasks, the company reports. Even without a search term, the search service shows which documents a person is working with and with which people the user often shares files. If a user is signed in to Office 365, it also works on Bing, Edge, and Windows. A search in Word or Windows, for example, can yield a presentation that the user is working on.

Microsoft gives the search bar a prominent and consistent place in its programs, including Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. On both desktop and mobile, the search bar gets the same positions with these services. In addition, the user can use the bar to operate the services. Entering ‘acc’ in Word, for example, shows the functions Accept Revision and Accessibility Checker, so that the user no longer has to call them up via the toolbar.

Initially, the company will integrate Microsoft Search into Bing.com, Office.com, and the SharePoint and Outlook mobile apps. It will also be coming to Office and Windows 10 in the first half of 2019.