Available for online shoppers

Jul 28, 2009 08:24 GMT  ·  By

Making product reviews easily accessible to end users is a move designed to reflect the status of decision engine vs. the plain vanilla search engine of Bing, Microsoft underlined. The Redmond company revealed that over three million product reviews had been indexed by its decision/search engine, all of which were put at the disposal of online shoppers that used Bing to find deals. The product reviews are integrated into the user experience delivered by the shopping vertical of Bing, and are designed to allow users to access opinions from other consumers before they make up their mind and buy.

“One part of Bing shopping that customers find very useful are all of the product reviews we’ve gathered. There are over 3 million reviews from all over the web from people just like you that we combine and provide in one place. We hope this makes finding the product that suits you best much faster and easier. And how could that many personal opinions (and growing) be wrong?” asked Bridget Tate, from Bing Shopping.

According to statistics from Microsoft, Bing Shopping is one of the decision/search engine's verticals that have enjoyed strong growth following the death of Live Search. Introduced at the end of May 2009, Bing Shopping attracted three times more visits to the website in just the first month. With more audience, the volume of transactions via Bing cashback also increased, the software giant noted, jumping by 5.42%, also in just one month.

“The best thing about Bing shopping’s user reviews are how they are categorized. We do what we call “opinion indexing” which is a fancy term for “extracting opinions” which is a fancy term for, well, finding exactly what you want to know about product by using some computer science to find and present expert reviews to you at the precise time you are trying to make a purchase decision,” Tate added. “Bringing the unique product features details and the details on how users have then rated or ranked what they like or dislike (sometimes down to the individual product feature level), allows you to really get a sense for the product before you make a buying decision.”