14 DAY TRIAL // Almost a year after it replaced Live Search with Bing, Microsoft is introducing a fresh, new release of its search/decision engine. Effective today, March 25th, 2010, approximately 5% of users in the United States will come across the new Bing experience via what the company refers to as the preview of the next major release of Bing. According to Todd Schwartz, from the Bing team, the preview is essentially a testing program designed to allow users to try out new Bing features. Following the testing period, Microsoft plans to roll out the next wave of Bing features to all users later this spring and summer.
“To start we wanted to focus on doing more to help users with the tasks they turn to search to help them with. Our research showed that 42% of sessions require refinements, searching sessions are getting longer, and we see that many of those refinements happen when trying to complete common tasks. At launch, we introduced Quick Tabs in the Explore Pane (left rail) to give customers 1-click tools to help refine queries and help them go from question to decision,” Schwartz noted.
Although the feature managed to produce what Microsoft referred to as a lot of customer engagement, it is clear that the company is willing to attempt to do a lot better. In this regard, the software giant will fine-tune Quick Tabs. As a direct consequence, work has been done to improve the overall design of Bing pages. Microsoft has strived for the next major release of Bing to deliver a lighter, cleaner presentation of results. The purpose is, of course, to bring the focus on key actions that will boost search efficiency.
“So over the next few months, we are going to test some new design concepts moving Quick Tabs functionality to the top of the page for 1-click access to our most robust, visual, and organized pages. We think this approach is a better way for Bing to anticipate user intent and adapt both the page and the results to help make faster, more informed decisions,” Schwartz stated.
With the evolution of Bing, Microsoft continues its foray into real-time data. For the time being, search engines, and Microsoft’s decision engine is no exception, find it extremely hard to keep up-to-date with news and information in real time by themselves. This is why Microsoft has tapped Twitter for an additional source of data. “This week, we will test new experiences for real-time results. For example, when you search for a publication such as the New York Times, Bing not only gives you quick access to specific sections of the destination website, but also provides the most popular shared links from that publication,” Schwartz said.
The next major version of Bing will also enable users to find better local information through the integration of the decision engine with map content. Through Map Apps, Bing users will be able to leverage a spatial search platform. “Today we previewed a cool new map application, which brings real time data from foursquare into our Silverlight maps experience to give customers a real time sense of what’s going on as they plan activities in their own neighborhoods or while on the road,” Schwartz noted.
