The Bing Social Sidebar Gets a New Look

At Bing, we realize that sometimes the most useful information doesn’t come from ten blue links. By bringing together knowledge from social networks with traditional web results, Bing is the only engine that saves you time allowing you to make decisions with greater confidence based on the input of other people.

Today we’re rolling out a new streamlined design for our social sidebar feature making it easier to find people who are relevant to your search based on what they’ve shared, publically blogged or tweeted about. In a glance you can now see friends, experts and enthusiasts from leading networks including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Klout have shared. While the sidebar will remain off to the right of search results – allowing you to decide when and how to interact with it – we have made some changes to the design: 

We have removed the need to hover over a friend or expert to see additional content – now with one glance you can see content front and center clearly marked “social results”.

We have left-justified the results so there is less blank space on the page.

If you want to dive and see additional social results, we’ve added “+ see all” icon that lets you dive into more information.

Whether you’re planning your next vacation or trying to decide what movie to see this weekend, the sidebar now shows you upfront what friends and experts have shared—making it easier to find the information you need to get stuff done.

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NEW

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The changes will be rolling out over the next few days. As always, we’re eager to get your feedback so let us know what you think in the comments below or on Twitter (@Bing.)

– Chris Rayner, Principal Group Program Manager, Bing Social