Holiday season is in full swing. And what a great time of year it is – the snow is flying, people are heading out on vacation to spend time with family and friends, and everyone’s got some last minute things to do. At Bing, our goal is to make your life a little easier no matter what the task or decision, and we recently launched some new richer, enhanced search results that can help you do just that.

In fact, this was the subject of the ‘Mixed Media Search’ panel at Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago a couple weeks ago. There I talked about how Bing is moving beyond the ’10 blue links’ with richer and more organized pages that are designed to help consumers complete tasks and make better decisions. We’re delivering more of these richer experiences to help make the tough decisions and complete tasks big and small. Here are a couple examples of a few recent features that demonstrate how we’re evolving search from just listing links to actually providing you rich information, experiences, and tools.

As you probably remember, we recently launched Visual Search and it’s an easy way jog the memory, come up with some great travel ideas, and quickly narrow your options from over 230 destinations worldwide for an easier way to search hundreds of destinations quickly.

If you want to stay closer to home, but still enjoy some New Year’s fun, check out Miami. The first result is a veritable smorgasbord of information to help you make the decision. For thousands of city results we go deeper in understanding the searchers intent to make the result more helpful and relevant to save you clicks and time. For Miami, we’ve organized the top query tasks into simple links for attractions, neighborhoods, and events. We’ve even put the current weather in the top results. To make search decisions easier, you can take a beautiful “virtual tour” of Miami by clicking on the photo with the Slideshow feature. As you can see, with our new enhanced city result pages, there’s a lot of rich, intuitive ways to help you make the best vacation decision.

Knowing the weather is key to great holiday travels. With Bing’s new weather results page, making the decision of where to go, what to wear, and how to get there safely is easier than ever. On the weather page we see current and extended forecast from multiple providers, the average monthly temperature and weather for New Years. What makes this page unique, and the weather decision so easy, is that Bing provides multiple providers so you save time comparing forecasts without having to search all around the web. Even better, Bing ranks them based on historical accuracy, to help you get the best results possible.

These new richer, more task-centric types of search results pages certainly help plan holiday travel, but for helping you enjoy the holidays, the team hasn’t stopped. In addition to the recent events results pages, we just launched our new movie results pages. With movie results, you can easily decide which movie to go see, and where to see it. Pick a great movie by watching the trailer, reading the ratings and reviews, and find a theatre nearby. Then the helpful thing here is that you can easily pivot by showtime or theatre by clicking on a theatre to find the best theatre location and time convenient for you.

Finally, if you want to check your portfolio before the end of the year, or see how your stock or mutual fund is doing, Bing just introduced our investor data results pages. This new page gives you a rich graph with stock or fund performance, key investor data, news and insights to help you decide to buy or sell before the New Year. Not sure what to do? Bing can help with one-click refinements help you identify other top performing stocks, new strategies, and other market leaders in an industry, sector, or similar stock. This might even make it to Cramer’s top 10 list of holiday treats.

The Bing team has been busy before the holidays trying to make you’re pre-holiday searches as helpful, rich, and powerful as possible. Over the last couple years, Search has continued to get better at understanding the intent behind the tasks people are trying to accomplish, and providing more information and experiences to help do more and do it more quickly and easily. If you have some last minute things to do this week, give Bing a try and see if it can help you make your life a bit easier this holiday season.

Happy Holidays,

Todd Schwartz

Group Product Manager, Bing