The Bing Search Team rolled out a new change to personalized search on September 14th called Adaptive Search, which is their latest attempt at determining search intent. The new feature uses your search history, primarily what searches you have done in the past, to help them determine what you're actually looking for.

Bing did not explain in detail how this technology works, but the scenario given is if you've been planning a vacation and conducting searches related to travel, when you search for Australia Bing will present sites related to the country. On the other hand, if you've been researching different movies recently and you search for Australia, Bing will show results for the movie instead.

Bing's Stefan Weitz had this to say...

"Every time you search on Bing, the information provided helps Bing understand what you're trying to do. The more you search, the more Bing can learn - and use that information to adapt the experience so you can spend less time searching and accomplish what you set out to do.

In Bing's Search Blog example, the query term CSI was used which could mean a number of different things such as the TV show, or the College of Southern Idaho, two highly different topics. Adaptive Search is how Bing intends on determining "which" of these variations you're looking for.

When we tested the CSI query term at Bing, apparently our search history didn't contain anything to help Bing determine which CSI we were looking for. However there were other personalized search features we did see kick in, which did provide some variation. Overwhelmingly the CSI TV Show related results ranked at the top of the page, but buried down half the way on the page we start to see variations that are location relevant. In this example, we had the user's location set to Tulsa, Oklahoma and received results for CSI Oklahoma (Consultin...