Microsoft is absolutely enamoured with the potential of a New York-based start-up called Qwiki. In fact, it is such a fan of the innovative company that they have elected to work with them to bring interactive video presentations to their Bing search engine. Qwiki works by pulling media content from various sources to create automatically generated video presentations on a plethora of topics.
The union allows Bing’s searches to feature “qwikis”, which are machine generated videos that serves to enhance the search experience for various topics. Over three million qwikis have been integrated into Bing to date, including Wikipedia page results and other popular sites.
Thus far, the machine generated presentations feature a robotic and mechanical sounding voice as narrator. This is due to change thanks to a recent revamp that Qwiki launched in May of this year. This function, known as the Qwiki Creator allows publishers and interested parties to create their very own qwikis. This creates a tool for knowledgeable parties to create concise and informative video presentations that take search results to a new level. Creator also features an API that allows content creators to produce their own qwikis on a mass scale, creating an infinitely powerful search tool.
According to a recent VentureBeat interview with Qwiki CEO Doug Imbruce, no money has exchanged hands between themselves and Microsoft (Bing), as both parties consider the union a simple case of mutual benefit.
Imbruce also confirmed that mobile support for qwikis would be coming to mobile platforms soon as well. The union is extremely exciting, and merges two of the biggest drivers in tech today; search and video. We look forward to the integration of video into Bing’s search results and where both parties take it moving forward.
To see it in action, check out the following Qwiki Demo featuring CEO Doug Imbruce courtesy of the good folks at Mashable.
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