Bing Autosuggest – History Repeats Itself – and That is a Good Thing

We’ve been working hard to help your complete your search tasks more quickly.  We’re happy to announce support for query history in Autosuggest today to help make that vision a reality.  Autosuggest now supports suggestions from your query history.  Many users search for a set of topics again and again.  It could be you searching on your favorite hobbies, doing online research, looking up local attractions or directions – the particular query subjects are very specific to you.  To make searching easier and reduce all those wasted clicks, many people found our history feature very useful to get them to where they’re going faster.  So we experimented with providing your prior searches in Autosuggest and found it’s even more useful in to helping find what you’re looking for faster!

Search history in Autosuggest can help you in other ways too.  Many search tasks span multiple search sessions even days or weeks.  In fact, 44% of non-navigational search sessions last longer than 1 week!  Perhaps you need to research the purchase of a new automobile.  You might use Bing to find a retail location and to further research online – over many days – to make the best decisions on your big ticket purchase.  With history support in Autosuggest, you can restart a previous search session by typing a few characters to see your previous queries and start researching right where you left off.  We know from our testing that this makes you more effective at your longer search tasks.

Previous search queries in Autosuggest show in a special color, purple, the same color your browser uses to display visited links.

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You are in full control of your query history.  We know your privacy is very important to you.  You can turn History on or off at any time or selectively remove any portion of your search history using the Manage History option.    You will see both of these choices every time you use Autosuggest.

We hope you enjoy Autosuggest with History and that it saves you time and improves your search effectiveness. 

Use it and tell us what you think! 

Thank you!

Robert Williams and Todd Schwartz