14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has made Bing a real steal for all users hunting for special offerings, discounts, cheap purchases, etc. through a partnership with The Dealmap. With the advent of Bing Deals, the Redmond company is now providing a centralized and searchable collection of special deals harvested from a variety of top sources for bargains, including Groupon and Living Social.
Available on the software giant’s decision engine for end users using desktops, laptops, etc., but also on the mobile flavor of Bing (m.bing.com), the deals will be discoverable in more ways than one.
The Redmond company will annotate results returned to user queries with information about discounts, when they exist.
At the same time, customers will be able to navigate directly to the Bing Deals page and get a list with the top bargains provided by default, with some of them as high as 50%.
Of course, all the results on Bing Deals can have a variety of filters applied to them, including getting the decision engine to show only deals in the proximity of the user.
It’s important to note that Bing Deals does not favor specific products or campaigns.
The bargain section of the decision will give “you access to more than 200,000 unique offers in over 14,000 cities and towns across the U.S. Bing deals assembles leading offers from Groupon, Living Social and Restaurant.com (just to name a few), making it easier to discover, share and search for the best deals in your area – all from one place,” revealed Andy Chu, Director of Product Management.
For the time being the Deals area of m.bing.com needs HTML5 enabled smartphones in order to work, which means that, at least for the time being, the users’ options are limited to iPhone and Android devices, with Windows Phone 7 getting HTML5 support later this year with Internet Explorer 9 Mobile.
The only drawback I see in relation to Bing Deals is the focus on the US market, but the promise from the Bing team is that users in more markets will be able to take advantage of the decision engine in order to get the best deals possible.
“Instead of creating our own program, we’ve partnered with The Dealmap, to launch Bing deals. Bing’s mission is to help you cut through the clutter of the Web to make decisions more quickly – whether that’s through our own innovations or by teaming up with industry experts,” Chu added.
“The Dealmap is a leading source for people to find and share the best local deals, so naturally it made sense for us to team up with them to bring you the best experience.”