14 DAY TRIAL // As Live Search was replaced with Bing, users of Microsoft's search engine could easily notice that the Redmond-based company was doing things a bit different. One aspect of the evolution introduced with Bing is the Best Match feature. The successor of Live Search is capable, for certain queries, of narrowing down a specific result, and of highlighting it to users at the top of the results webpage as the best for the search entered.
Martin Stoddart, Senior Product Manager, Bing, explained that the search engine was designed to offer its users a streamlined, distinct and highly accessible space of the best match result for their queries.
“Why did we bother to do this?” Stoddart asked. “Don’t search engines deliver the best result at the top of the page anyway? Today, while search engines do a pretty good job at finding the best result for a simple query, they generally won’t tell you if the top result is the official one, nor will they help you navigate within that site. Nearly a third of queries fall into this “navigational” category – where you’re really only looking for one particular site. But today people often can’t immediately find what they are looking for on a results page – only 1 in 4 queries return a completely successful result.”
But Bing does much more than simply highlighting a certain result. Fact is that the search engine uses the real estate space at the top of the page in order to provide a foray into the Best match website. Right from Bing, users will be able to navigate into the website via deeplinks, and even access information and features that would otherwise require them to actually browse the Internet property.
“We decided to make Best match work even harder for certain sites by incorporating some of the key features of the official site right there on the search results page. Best match can include a “search within” bar that allows you to set up a query of the official site. Where appropriate, Best match also includes a customer service number at the top of the page – a feature that people told us was of particular interest. We didn’t stop there though. Site specific tools can also be incorporated on the page,” Stoddart added.