Bing Updates up Close

Last night we brought together some leaders in the entertainment industry to discuss how technology is changing the way we interact with media. We also came together to kick off the latest release of Bing with the launch of Bing Entertainment, a destination for all your entertainment searches. As part of our work in this summer release, we also made a significant investment and update in the way we’re visually presenting information with a new user experience. Read more about these updates in yesterday’s blog posts.

As Satya mentioned yesterday the latest release of Bing is aimed at making it easier for you to complete tasks and make better decisions. In addition to our updated user experience and new features around entertainment, we’ve been improving and enhancing our existing verticals to bring you more definitive content in areas such as news, travel, finance, health and more. 

This post will go deeper into the broad range of updates contained in our summer release. Read on for lots of detail, examples and screenshots of the latest updates to Bing. Make sure you check the Bing blog over the next couple weeks as we go even deeper on these updates and new features.

Bing News

69% of people turn to a search engine to find information about news. Bing News helps you find the news stories you care about faster with a fresh new design and news organized by topic. On the top of the page, you will see Quick Tabs that give you easy access to various news topics including World news, Business news, Entertainment news and more. Directly underneath the Quick Tabs, you can see news-related videos, create a news alert, or set up an RSS feed. Bing News also features the top 4 headlines of the day and helps you find the freshest and most credible news sites faster. Local news is a top scenario as well, and so we’ve made it easier to access both local and national news all in one place.

clip_image002Bing Finance

Bing Finance helps you make finance related decisions by giving you a quick view of the market and giving you tools to find and evaluate stocks and funds. In addition to a visual update with a scrolling ticker bar, we’ve included a stock screener to help you with investment decisions.

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Combined Flight Answers

We’ve enhanced the travel experience by combining our flight tools into one simple display. When you search for queries like “flights jfk to sfo” a combined answer appears which includes an airfare deal to your travel destination along with price prediction alongside a flight search form where you can enter your departure dates right on the search results page. Click “find flights” to see the fares to the destination of your choice. Using historical pricing data, Bing will determine whether fares will rise, hold steady, or fall within a certain degree of confidence.

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Autosuggest

About 25% of searches are navigational meaning that users want to go directly to a specific website when searching. To help with this task, Bing now has direct navigation to top websites right within the autosuggest drop down. For example, if you type in “Amazon”, you can click on the first autosuggest link and go directly to amazon.com.

In addition to direct navigation, you can now check the weather right within the autosuggest dropdown. This will give you quick, easy access to today’s weather without the need to load a new results page. On average, people check the weather about 3 times per day so we hope to save you time and clicks the next time you’re searching for the forecast.

autosuggest

Visual Search

Bing recently got more social and we’re continuing on that road with the release of a new Visual Search gallery of the top twitter users. See who has the most followers and the most tweets. Or, see which occupations have the most twitter users by refining your search using the filters on the left-hand side.

Twitter users

So there you have it, a deeper look into a number of updates for Bing that we hope will help you complete tasks and make better decisions. You can also get more information at the just updated http://www.Discoverbing.com site. There you can learn about the product, explore Bing’s great features through slideshows and videos, learn all about Bing Entertainment, find out how to set Bing as your default, and connect more deeply with Bing in a number of ways. Come back to the Bing Blog over the next few weeks to learn even more about the features in this summer updates. In the meantime, go to Bing, check them out, and let us know what you think! 

Todd Schwartz – Bing Director

Other posts of interest:

Investing Decisions Simplified with Bing

Bing Updates up Close

A New Entertainment Experience for Bing

Bing Gets a Fresh Look

Bing for iPhone Update