Great news.  All the new features we blogged about last week are live for 100% of our users.  Many of you may have seen them over the past few days as the ramp progressed, but now everyone can take full advantage of the great work the team has done in this fall wave for Bing.

I wanted to point that out because recently, to my complete surprise, I was told that all of you don’t follow every single one of Bing’s developments with breathless abandon.  I had simply assumed that all of you had alerts on this blog complete with a hacked-up method of automatically sending texts to your mobile devices whenever some nugget of search wisdom materializes on the blog. 

Apparently I was wrong.

My wife drove this point home to me a few weeks ago when grilling me about just exactly it is that I do at work all day.  I stared at her dumbly – more so than usual – and said, “you know, I work on Bing!  All those new features we’ve launched since June that map to those unmet customer needs you always hear me talking about.”  (yes, bizarrely, I do talk about unmet customer needs in search way too often.  I’m pretty sure even my daughter knows that stat about successful algorithmic query clicks).  My wife, who is a computer science and math major and not unskilled in the ways of the interwebs, said “yeah, well there’s too much news out there about search.  It makes it hard for me to see what’s new.”

That’s it.  A challenge was laid down.  A challenge from which I could only escape by a) avoiding my wife by traveling a lot or b) building something which would help people see what’s new in search and particularly what’s new in Bing.  I chose both, but that’s another post.

So we have launched Behind Bing as a way to help people see what’s new and notable in this wave of innovation from Bing.  You can see each feature in action though a screencast, see me talk about why we did it the way we did (for those who like to geek out), and get some drill-down details.  For those of you pressed for time, check out “Features for You” at the bottom of the site which highlights some features that I thought were especially cool depending on what and where you are.

 

There, honey.  You’re welcome.

Stefan Weitz