Less than a year after launching its decision engine, Microsoft plans to revamp Bing. The company is testing some new Bing features on its way to the next iteration that will debut later this spring and summer.
The underlying premise of Bing won’t change. Microsoft’s search engine will still work to help people make decisions. But the user experience will see some changes.
“Bing is rolling out a range of new features in areas where they think they have strength and are differentiating versus Google,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “These include query refinements — which they say get at user intent — more real-time or dynamic content in search and enhanced information in selected verticals like local and autos. The overall user interface is also a feature that differentiates what Microsoft is doing from Google.”
Refining Search Results
Todd Schwartz from the Bing team said Microsoft wants to do more to help users with the tasks that search resolves. Microsoft’s research found that 42 percent of search sessions require refinements, searching sessions are getting longer, and many of those refinements happen while searchers are trying to complete common tasks.
An original Bing feature called QuickTabs aimed to help searchers refine their queries, but Microsoft wants to make the tool even more intelligent. Schwartz said over the next few months Bing will test some new design concepts moving Quick Tabs functionality to the top of the page for one-click access to Bing’s most visual and organized pages. Microsoft is betting this approach is a better way for Bing to anticipate user intent and adapt both the page and the results to help users make faster decisions.
Schwartz also pointed to efforts to help searchers keep up with everyday activities like news and information. Bing partnered with Twitter last October to…