In January we told you about our goal to bring the Power of Bing Knowledge to Webmasters. In April we followed up on that promise and announced Bing Knowledge Widget. For the first time, we empowered every webmaster to use the entity data from the Bing Knowledge repository. Since then, webmasters have added the embed code to thousands of pages to enhance their websites with the rich entity information from the Bing Knowledge system.
Integration with Webmaster Tools
Today, we are taking the next step and are making it even easier for webmasters to put Bing Knowledge to work on their sites by integrating the functionality to do so into Bing Webmaster Tools. Now, you can easily manage multiple Bing Knowledge Widgets and settings from within the familiar Webmaster Tools experience. And when you customize your settings, instead of you having to update your pages with new embed code and republish every time you make a change, we provide you with just a single line of code and let you manage and store your settings in the cloud. What’s more, we’ve incorporated some of your early feedback and added additional functionality to benefit you and your visitors:
A new way of detecting and invoking entity information
Previously we introduced 3 ways in which you could tell us to visualize entities found on your page:
- As Entity links
- As Entity images
- As both Entity images & links
These are great options and many of you chose to proactively visualize entities contained within your content using both images and links. However, we realize that this doesn’t work for all sites and all scenarios. Sometimes you want to allow your users to benefit from Bing Knowledge in a more subtle manner and not always proactively show what’s more to explore. To address this need, we’ve now added a fourth option: Interactive only.
Interactive only is a new option that detects and visualizes entities when users select text.
If you choose “Interactive only”, we will identify and visualize entities only when a user selects text on the page (e.g. by highlighting it) and clicking the Bing logo. Naturally, we will still take surrounding context into consideration to understand which entity is contained in the selected text and present most relevant results. If you select any of the other 3 visualization modes, the interactive option is automatically enabled.
Additional control over what gets marked up
Entity detection works great in many cases and across many content segments (e.g. celebrities, songs, athletes, sports, politicians, localities, and so on). That said, sometimes we may get it wrong and mark up a piece of text with information about the wrong entity. Now, you already could make the decision to surround a piece of text with for example a <span> tag and using a CSS class attribute that you would block from being marked up in your settings. However, you would have to touch the code of your page (which may not always be possible) and you would need to do this for each page that has the wrong entity. To simplify this, you can now create a “text block” inside Webmaster Tools. This text block can be defined either at the site level (to fix a problem that is occurring across your site) or at the page level (to fix a problem on a single page URL). Once you have created the text block, we will stop marking up the text defined in that text block on the next refresh cycle. Like customization settings, text blocks are stored in the cloud, so you won’t need to touch your web pages at all.
To learn more on how to get started, head on over to the Webmaster Help Center and read the Knowledge Widget help article.
Conclusion
By adding the Bing Knowledge Widget feature directly into Webmaster Tools we are making it a lot easier for Webmasters to add Bing Knowledge Widget to their sites and keep users engaged within the context of their pages. With settings stored in the cloud, tuning and customizing Bing Knowledge widget to work best with your site has become even easier. By using the new Interactive only option, you can now benefit from Bing Knowledge without it ever getting in the way of your own content. I am looking forward to continue to hear from your via our feedback alias and in the comments as we evolve our entity experiences for webmasters.
Thank you for evolving with us!
The very best from Seattle
Vincent Wehren
Senior Program Manager
Bing Webmaster Experiences