Microsoft dramatically revamped its Bing search results page on Thursday, adding a "sidebar" that will allow users to interact with knowledgeable friends on a variety of topics.
The new Bing UI will roll out in the next few weeks, said Derrick Connell, corporate vice president of Bing, at the Bing Search Summit at Microsoft's Silicon Valley headquarters. Consumers can also sign up at the Bing site to be notified of the new update.
Microsoft tipped its redesign somewhat when it recently "cleaned up" the Bing search results page, trimming some elements and leaving a large "gutter" to the right of the page. That gutter was actually a deliberate design decision, helping users more easily skim down the list of results, Connell said. Now, however, that gutter has been filled with a "snapshot" and the "sidebar" of personalized recommendations.
Microsoft's move toward a social form of search began with an October 2010 partnership between Facebook and Bing that promoted links that friends "liked" or shared via Facebook. The agreement was expanded the following February, integrating likes into actual results.
Now, with the new format, Bing essentially integrated a cross-platform tool for social search, allowing users to query friends who the Bing algorithms determine will be the most likely sources of information. "A checkin offers more information than a search result," said Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, during the presentation.
The three-column design also directly challenges Google's design premise: that users want social search results mixed in with their algorithmic results. "Both Bing and Google were starting to jam social signals into the Web results, and it turns out it wasn't that relevant and it was overloading users with clutter," Connell said.
Instead, Bing trimmed links to what it felt was a "core" search. Connell said that the redesigned page would be faster to load than the current page, without specifying if he meant a basic core search, or with the addition of the snapshots and sidebars.
In certain cases, such as a search for a list of hotels in Honolulu, users will hover a particular hotel. In this case, a "snapshot" of the hotel will appear to the immediate right, with a few recent reviews, a box to search for rates and availability, and pictures and other information. These "entities," as Microsoft calls them, will have their own snapshots where users can accomplish goals, and more snapshots will appear over time as Microsoft determines "clear customer intent" of what they're searching for.
But the sidebar is where users can essentially receive personalized recommendations from people they know. Users who are logged into various social networks - including Facebook, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn, and others - will have their friends information automatically searched, if they allow it. Friends who posted status updates about a recent visit to Hawaii, for example, or those who live there, will be given "weight" in the search results.
Interestingly, users can also directly interact with the social networks themselves from within the sidebar, posting status updates to Facebok, for example. If a user asks what the best hotel is in Honolulu, that status update will be posted, but a message will apparently be sent to the users Bing feel may be the most relevant.
Bing first identifies "friends who might know," then "people who know" - a travel blogger, for example. Executives said the source of the knowledge may vary: it may be a user's Twitter feed or Facebook page, blog, or even a corporate site.
Connell also said that continual improvements, or iterations, will be added to the Bing results page over time, on a weekly and even a daily basis.
So far, neither the snapshot nor the sidebar contained advertising, but executives said that may be added later.
Unfortunately, a three-column design does not really work on a smartphone, so Microsoft executives displayed a mobile app with the additional "sidebar" at the bottom.
Bing left its home page relatively unchanged, albeit with some minor changes. For example, the background image will now be scaled to fit larger monitors, executives said.
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