Bing Knowledge Widget

At Bing, we want to help people do more and know more. We’ve been building Bing’s knowledge repository that now has hundreds of millions of entities (people, places, and things) and billions of relationships between them. This helps us create a deeper understanding of our world. The quest to understand our world cannot be done alone. We work with many partners who enrich our knowledge. We give what we’ve learned back to the world via Bing.com and Windows Search Charm.

Now, we want to empower every webmaster with the power of Bing’s knowledge repository. Today we’re releasing the Bing Knowledge Widget for webmasters and publishers. It’s an easy-to-deploy, JavaScript-based widget for webmasters that detects and visualizes entities on the webpage and displays rich information about the entity. It provides your visitors with quick access to relevant information about the entities on the page, and keeps them engaged, entertained, and informed within the context of your webpage. A visitor to your site need simply hover over the objects you’ve selected in the backend to see the widget come to life along the right-hand side of the screen, showcasing content related to each entity, directly from Bing’s knowledge repository.

Here’s an example of the Knowledge Widget in action in a blog post related to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. You can see how it is understanding the entities of the page and bringing in useful, related content.

You can easily configure how you want Bing Knowledge Widget to visualize the entities detected on a page. There are three pre-defined options:

• Entity Images: when you select this option entities that are detected will appear only as images in a vertical carousel alongside the page.
• Entity Images & Links: when you select this option entities that are detected will appear both as images in a vertical carousel alongside the page as well as links within the text of the page. This is the most popular option.
• Entity Links: when you select this option, entities that are detected will appear as links within the text of the page.

When you have chosen a visualization option that includes entity links, you can set the link style associated with these entity links. You can select from a number of pre-defined options or provide a name that you have defined yourself. Without getting into all of the set-up details, which can be fully explored on the dedicated Bing Knowledge Widget Help & How To page, the Knowledge Widget enables you to create a unique user experience for your visitors, which you control, and that is powered by Bing’s knowledge repository.

App Linking

At the same time we’re also announcing the App Linking functionality for businesses. Bing Webmaster Tools will be your interface to linking your website to your app. Bing App Linking lets you connect your app to your web site so that search results for the top level of your web site include a link to your app. If you implement deep linking, search results for pages within your web site will include deep links to targets inside your app.

App Linking is an extension of our Connected Sites concept, where you can connect official social pages, for example, and associate them with your site. This functionality now allows you to do the same for your apps. More information on the App Linking program can be found here, with the Help & How To content located here.

Bing Knowledge & Webmaster Teams