14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is working to bring localized versions of Bing to the level of the service for the US market. However, not all users worldwide will be able to benefit from the same level of features as the US-tailored variant of the search engine. For starters the Redmond company will start upgrading Bing for users in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and the UK. As far as users in the UK are concerned they will start seeing updates introduced to Bing as soon as the next few weeks, according to Ian Moulster, product manager at Microsoft.
“When bing.com was announced recently you may recall that while a full service was made available immediately in the US, a more limited beta service was provided in the UK while the team built out some UK-specific features so that the UK experience could be made as compelling as possible,” Moulster explained. “I spoke to the Core UK Product Manager for Bing, Sophie, to ask where we were in the process of bringing Bing UK up to the level of the US service. Sophie explained that within the next few weeks we’ll start seeing some changes to the UK bing.com site.”
At this point in time, the search engine that killed Live Search offers a full experience only to US users. For the UK for example, users continue to access a Beta version of the search engine. The same is valid for Australia, and for additional markets around the world. On July 1st, 2009, Microsoft promised that it would start bringing the search engine flavors tailored to users in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and the UK up to US level.
“The first change you’ll notice is some more UK-specific (or certainly less US-specific) background pictures on bing.com. For example, we’ll start seeing pictures that relate to UK activities, holidays, events or topics of national interest,” Salisbury stated. “The “hotspots” that appear on the US version will be introduced into the UK version, providing information and links related to aspects of the image. A little later in the summer we’ll see some of the categorisation introduced, paving the way for the “full blown” bing experience and beta tag removal following that by a few months.”