New Features Coming Soon For Bing
The “decision engine” recently posted on their blog that “new stuff” is on the way in the spring. Bing has been showing a lot of growth in the search engine market. Even though they are a fair amount behind Google, it is promising to see a competitor doing well and providing a different experience than Google. This different experience is directly related to the features both that are implemented and new ones that are on the way.
One interesting feature Bing posted about is expanding on the Quick Tabs feature. Quick Tabs is a way to help Bing users to narrow their search results when trying to complete common tasks. Refining queries to make a better decision (hence “decision engine”) is what Bing is trying to accomplish with this feature. Based on comments from Bing’s user experience team, the more Bing is used in search, the more it will learn about what you search for and help you make better, faster decisions in the future.
Bing is also showing promising real-time search results based on Twitter. Bing is able to grab the most popular topics shared on Twitter and when a user performs a search, Bing uses the information it grabs to show more information to the user rather than just a link. An example they posted on their blog shows a search for “New York Times” and shows a section of the most popular shared links from NYTimes on Twitter.
Bing Maps is getting some help in the real-time search department as well in the form of Foursquare. Users using Foursquare will have their check-ins and comments visible to those searching in the Maps section.
Bing posting these updates is very important in terms of SEO. Seeing that other search engines are heading into the social and real-time search allows SEO programs to shift more weight towards social media and networking to make sure they get noticed not only by network connections but by outside that circle as well.