At this point in the 21st century, the jury is still out on whether technology and social media are improving how government works or ruining politics. What we do know is that the 2016 election cycle is well underway, and with it the next generation of software designed to match voters with candidates.
On Tuesday, Microsoft introduced a new feature, the Bing Political Index, that doesn't just match up your political stances with those of the presidential candidates. It shows how the candidates' positions compare with public opinion.
The index also allows you to compare one candidate's positions to another's on 10 major issues. See how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compares to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders below:
Or, on the Republican side, see how real estate magnate Donald Trump compares to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz:
"The Bing Predicts team built the BPI by crunching terabytes of search and social data, layered with analysis from OnTheIssues.org to determine the sentiment scores," said Walter Sun, leader of the Bing Predicts team and a principal applied science manager.
OnTheIssues.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan website that chronicles the political positions of candidates, along with their voting records in office, press releases and media coverage.
Plus, Bing's Election 2016 page has a nifty timeline that lists primary and caucus dates over the coming year.
Ultimately, Bing Predicts will attempt to call the next U.S. president based upon the terabytes of online data.
An app "like OKCupid, but for elections" wasn't a new idea even in 2012, but it looks like Microsoft has advanced the state of the art.
Bing may not get a lot of public attention -- when was the last time you heard someone say "just Bing it?" -- but people are using the search engine. Between Bing.com and Yahoo, which uses Bing's results, Microsoft's offering now has about 33 percent of the U.S. search market, according to ComScore. If the public finds the new elections feature useful, more people might shift from Googling by default.
Sun told HuffPost that his team plans to add candidates from local elections in the future. That could have a much greater impact upon American politics since information about local candidates' views is generally harder for voters to find.
Let's see whether Google, media and local civic technologists can do better in the year ahead.