14 DAY TRIAL // A great search experience is only part of what Bing has to offer, with Microsoft also focusing to simplify the way in which users can take action on the results returned by the decision engine.
Action Buttons are the latest upgrade introduced to Bing, a new feature which simplifies a series of tasks for websites under a few specific categories.
Think of Action Buttons as of “deep links” on steroids. Bing displays a series of “deep links” for a variety of sites returned to user queries, surfacing the most popular pages.
Action Buttons are similar in a way, except that they’re designed to surface popular actions instead of pages.
“Today we are taking this a step further with the release of Action Buttons. Now when you search across 7 popular categories - including airlines, couriers (e.g. FedEx), restaurants, banks, rental cars, software downloads and hotels - you will be presented with buttons for top actions on the site, that directly take you to the page where you can complete your task,” revealed Deepak Vijaywargi, program manager, Bing.
On sites belonging to the categories mentioned above, customers searching with Bing will be able to perform a set of tasks right from the software giant’s decision engine, without having to waste time by navigating to additional interim pages.
“Based on how people search, our algorithms now determine top actions and corresponding links in the site for a given category with high precision,” Vijaywargi said.
“For instance, with airlines the top 3 tasks are: check-in to a flight, check the status of a flight or book a flight. For software sites, if you are searching for a specific product you likely want to download it. For car rental agencies, you’d like to rent a car, find out locations or contact them.”