Helping you get things done faster is a big focus for us at Bing.

Whether it’s checking the status of your flight, accessing your online banking account or booking a room at a hotel, we are constantly exploring ways to help you make faster decisions. One way we do this is with “deep links”. Historically, we have used “deep links” as a way to surface popular pages within a given site. For instance, the result for United Airlines includes the links “Check in online,” “Baggage,” and “Flight Search” at the top of the page so you can quickly narrow down what you’re looking for and go directly to that part of the site. 

Today we are taking this a step further with the release of Action Buttons. Now when you search across 7 popular categories – including airlines, couriers (e.g. FedEx), restaurants, banks, rental cars, software downloads and hotels – you will be presented with buttons for top actions on the site, that directly take you to the page where you can complete your task.

 

Based on how people search, our algorithms now determine top actions and corresponding links in the site for a given category with high precision.  For instance, with airlines the top 3 tasks are: check-in to a flight, check the status of a flight or book a flight. For software sites, if you are searching for a specific product you likely want to download it. For car rental agencies, you’d like to rent a car, find out locations or contact them.

 

With Action Buttons, it’s less about searching and more about getting things done. With one click of a button, you can get to what you’re looking for right from your search results.

Stay tuned for more from us in this area. In the meantime, let us know what you think.

– Deepak Vijaywargi, Program Manager, Bing.