Update is already live

Apr 9, 2010 08:59 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has updated one of the verticals of its search/decision engine, in order to kick up a notch the shopping experience for end users. The update to Bing Shopping is now live, and online buyers will be able to take advantage of the new features introduced immediately, as they look for products to buy. One important change is related to changes introduced to streamline research for online merchandise. Bing Shopping users will not need to enter any query in the search engine, but they can still explore products via the categories listed on the left-hand side pane.

“You’ll notice that we’ve created a list of product categories on the left side of the homepage to help you start your search. Just click a category to drill down to other parts of our catalogue to find the products you are looking to buy. We know how much we all love to window shop, just think of this as the online equivalent,” Lawrence Lam, from the Bing Shopping team, noted.

The video embedded at the bottom of this article delivers a comprehensive demonstration of the new features and capabilities available in Bing Shopping, now that this area of Microsoft’s search engine has been updated. Additional enhancements involve the summaries that are automatically put together from harvested information from across the web, and displayed to users for specific products they are interested in. In this regard, Bing Shopping is capable of grabbing a world of information from locations where the products are available, to price details, user reviews, Cashback discounts and special offerings, specifications, and display all the data, comprehensively, on a single page.

“We’ve also beefed the reviews section so that you get the most relevant and recent opinions from other people to help you find the best product or read about a feature you care about. You can narrow down by filtering on star ratings or use our powerful ‘opinion scorecard’ to find the information that relates specifically to a particular aspect of the product that interests you,” Lam added.