14 DAY TRIAL // One thing is clear about Bing, painfully so even. The search engine from Microsoft that killed off Live Search still has to grow until it will address international users in the same manner as those in the US. But it's not to say that Microsoft isn't trying. In fact, the Redmond company announced on July 1, 2009 that users in five markets around the world would start benefiting from the same premium class services as people in the US. Starting off the evolution will be the introduction of Bing customized home pages featuring image backgrounds tailored to each specific country, along with features such as hotspots.
“With Bing, our international markets also get a rich image version of the homepage. And starting next month, a number of those markets (including Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and the UK) will begin customizing the images to suit their unique audience, as well as adding their own hotspots,” revealed Stephanie Horstmanshof, Bing editorial lead.
Microsoft is thinking of hotspots like virtual Easter eggs. In order to get the full Bing experience users need to change the country setting to US, rather than whatever market the search engine defaults to. “If you hover your mouse over the image, you’ll find four of them every day. Each gives you a chance to find out more about the subject of the image for that day. Our goal in creating hotspots is to guide you toward interesting details about the image such as who, what, when, where and why. Sometimes you’ll even see a hotspot leading you to what we consider to be something wacky about or related to the image,” Horstmanshof added.
With the exception of the US, and the five additional markets mentioned in this article, international users, although getting background images, do not get the same rich experience. “The images are chosen from a variety of licensed photos with the goal of inspiring a sense of exploration and delight while piquing your interest to learn more,” Horstmanshof stated. “If you missed the previous day’s image (or just want to see it again) click the arrows to scroll through the past 7 days of homepage images. You can interact with each page just as you could when it originally appeared. (You need to have Silverlight installed.)”