Microsoft launches Bing's 'next chapter'

Jake Widman
Thursday, 12 November 2009 03:16

Your IT - Home IT

Upstart search engine Bing is getting some new features and search enhancements, including more direct travel searching, improved previews, and customizable maps.

As outlined on the Bing blog, Microsoft identified three qualities people are looking for in search engines: relevant results, a variety of answers, and quick response.

The new features are supposed to move Bing forward in those areas. They're being rolled out in the U.S. starting this week.

One set of enhancements are in travel planning, an area where Microsoft has always emphasized Bing's strengths.

Travel search results will now also come with destination information. For example, a search on the name of a city will return expanded results, with direct links to attractions, neighborhoods, and other local info.

The results pages will also feature slide shows of images from the destination. And a search for events in the city will bring up a summary of events that can be filtered by date, category, and so on.

Bing also has improvements to its preview feature that brings up summary text and related links to the right of the main result. The preview will now contain a thumbnail of the destination page, as well as contact info extracted from the web page and broken out into its own area.

For improvements to Bing Maps, see Page 2.