Microsoft is working with professors at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur to develop a search engine that will assist users looking for subjective information and trusted opinions. While current search engine algorithms work well with fact-based queries and can provide structured answers, queries based on human experiences and personal opinions are difficult for a standard search engine to understand. Questions such as “How to make small talk with new friends,” or “How does it feel to immigrate to a new country?” do not elicit satisfactory answers.
The Economic Times reports that Microsoft’s Senior Applied Researcher Manish Gupta partnered with professors from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur to conduct a study on extracting meaningful information from social conversations to help search engines answer social list queries better by deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The study eventually proved that, by analyzing multi-word hashtags such as #foreveralone, and #childhoodfeels for example, search engines can now scour social networks and detect valuable insights from public conversations, using a highly effective and precise algorithm.
Last updated: December 26th, 2025
