AP/Microsoft
A screenshot provided by Microsoft shows changes to Bing's website, which will reshape how Bing displays its search results.
Microsoft announced its biggest-ever revamp of its Bing
search engine on Thursday, saying it would use information from users’
Facebook accounts to mimic how questions are answered in the real world:
by asking friends who might know.
The extensive
redesign is aimed at helping bridge the stubborn gap with Google, which
still serves some two thirds of all U.S. web searches compared to 15 per
cent for Microsoft’s Bing. Bing also powers Yahoo’s search technology,
which accounts for a further 14 per cent of searches.
Microsoft launched Bing three years ago, investing more than 6 billion dollars on the project so far, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The new Bing platform will roll out in the U.S. in the coming days,
said Microsoft executive Qi Lu, and will feature three different columns
on the page. The first column features traditional web links, while the
middle column, called Snapshot, is reserved for actions related to
those searches, such as viewing movie trailers or booking tickets. The
third panel, called “Sidebar,” will feature answers from relevant people
on Facebook and Twitter and will soon be expanded to include other
social networks such as LinkedIn.
“People are using
the Web to do things in the real world, and that’s a big change from
where things were a decade ago,” Bing senior director Stefan Weitz said.
“And so the 10 blue links that search has been predicated on for the
last decade no longer makes sense. Simply put, that’s not how you get
things done.”
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