Can Microsoft Tiger take a bite out of Google? The Redmond company tonight released the first details of a collaboration between Microsoft Research and Bing engineers in China and the U.S. that promises to make the company’s search engine better behind the scenes.

The project, dubbed “Tiger,” uses advances in Solid State Disk technology to improve the way Bing checks its index for results when a user submits a search query.

“In Tiger, we not only look at improved efficiency but also look at new ways of processing queries,” says Yongdong Wang, general manager of Microsoft’s Search Technology Center in Asia, in the video above. “These news ways will enable scenarios where we can significantly improve the relevance of the results seen by users.”

Microsoft made the announcement as it kicked off a series of events marking its 20th anniversary this week. We’ll have more on that on Tuesday.

Follow-up: Microsoft Research demo: Augmented reality with Kinect, tablet, distributed computing

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