Bing Announces Plans for Change

When the transition from Microsoft to Bing started, Microsoft wanted to present Bing as a ‘decision engine’ rather than a traditional search engine. As Bing states, their goal is also to help users make a more informed decision with less time and effort. Has Bing achieved this goal? Not yet, but some changes are coming which can help this become a clearer reality.
Bing wants to focus on doing more to help users with their searches. Bing first introduced Quick Tabs in the Explore Pane (left rail) to give users 1-click tools to help refine queries and help them go from question to decision with the goal of helping users make a more informed decision with less time and effort.

Now? Jeff Henshaw, GPM of our user experience team, says: “[O]ver the next few months, we are going to test some new design concepts moving Quick Tabs functionality to the top of the page for 1-click access to our most robust, visual, and organized pages. We think this approach is a better way for Bing to anticipate user intent and adapt both the page and the results to help make faster, more informed decisions”.

Bing will also incorporate better real-time search as well as location-based search into its improvements. Its improvements to real-time search come with greater authority. When users search for a publication such as the New York Times, Bing will not only provide quick access to specific sections of the destination website, but will also provide the most popular shared links from that publication. As for location, Bing writes, “today we previewed a cool new map application, which brings real time data from foursquare into our Silverlight maps experience to give customers a real time sense of what’s going on as they plan activities in their own neighborhoods or while on the road”.

Will these be effective changes for Bing?