With all the money being spent on, and all the futuristic talk about about big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence and all things in between, it’s easy to forget that Microsoft and Google — two of the companies leading research in these technologies — still have large businesses in web search. So as cool and potentially life-altering as AI might be in fields such as medicine, we’ll probably continue to see the signs of things to come in search engines first.

It’s big business and a great testing ground.

Take, for example, Microsoft Bing’s new predictions feature that tries to predict the outcomes of popular fan-voting show such as The Voice, American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. Bing does this by analyzing a number of signals, including searches, Twitter and Facebook data, and, presumably the outcomes of previous episodes. (Hat tip to Search Engine Land for spotting this Bing blog post, as well as…