With the latest version of Messenger, you can now bring Bing into your conversations in a few exciting new ways.

The first way you will be able to do this is through contextual linking. When a term is recognized, a green dashed line appears under that term. When you click on that word, you are given links from Bing to websites, photos, and videos which you can add to your conversation.

Some of the categories of content that Messenger and Bing recognize include:

· Brands

· Bands and Singers

· Places

· Famous Movies

· Famous people

The other way is to use the information from Bing as a search and share experience.  You are able to add content that is indexed and searched by Bing directly into your conversation. Let’s say you want to share a video with a friend you are having a conversation with over IM, below are the steps to embed the video:

· From the IM toolbar you select: Share video from Bing.

· Enter your search term in the Bing search box

· Click the magnifying glass

· Pick the video you want to share

Now you can share information from Bing right inside your Messenger conversation. You can download the Messenger Beta for Windows 7 and Windows Vista here. So, give it a try and let us know what you think.

For more information on this and some of the other new Windows Live Messenger features make sure to check out their team blog post.

Kristin Meldahl - Bing

Last month, we had the pleasure of announcing that, in conjunction with Apple, Bing would be included as one of the search engine choices within Safari.

Today, we’d like to introduce our first extension for Safari: Bing Highlights.

Bing Highlights brings intelligent, contextually sensitive information to the web pages you’re reading. Using it is easy: just highlight text on a web page. Bing Highlights will recognize interesting information (or “entities” in information science-speak) and offer you some smart choices.

For example, here’s what may happen if you highlight a U.S. formatted address:

You can interact with the map in the pane, and get driving directions.

If you highlight some text in a foreign language, you can get translations. You can even hear the text spoken by clicking on the icons.

You can also get up-to-date flight status information by highlighting a flight number:

And, of course, you can easily get search results from Bing for any text that you select. This extension helps bring the power of Bing one step closer to your fingertips.

Click to download Bing Highlights from Apple’s Safari Extension Gallery. It works with Safari 5.0.1 or newer, for both Mac and PC.

Creating this extension was fun, and we are excited to continue working closely with Apple in bringing visually compelling Bing experiences to Safari.

On behalf of the entire Bing Highlights team, I hope you enjoy our product!

Dennis Cheung – Bing, Senior Program Manager Lead

What do pool sharks, fancy flowers, sassy hair do’s and spooky fish all have in common?

They’re all part of a stellar line up of new casual games that can be found on Bing – available right in the Bing entertainment browser! Earlier this summer Yusuf mentioned casual games were part of our new entertainment experience on Bing and these new games are just one more way we are continuing to expand and deepen your online gaming experience.

The search for free games is on with the addition of some of our favorites including Belle's Beauty Boutique, Carniball, Fishdom Spooky Splash, Jigsaw, 8 Ball Champion, Pyramid Solitaire and Gardenscapes. 

We love gaming with our friends on Bing.  It’s a fun and easy way to get the latest real-time Facebook feeds and compare gaming scores, all while playing the best free casual games!  Just search, click and play! 

Alejandro Cabrera – Group Manager of Social & Casual Games

Comparison shopping has been around for ages and all of us do it. Whether checking different stores to compare prices or reading reviews on various products, there’s just something about getting the best deal on the best product that validates the entire shopping experience (or maybe that’s just me).  As more and more activities become mobile, comparison shopping is as well. In fact, research shows that 56% of iPhone users compare prices when shopping on their phone. With the recent update to the Bing iPhone app we’re excited to make comparison shopping with your phone even easier with the new camera scanning feature on the Bing for iPhone app. 

Haven’t tried it yet? Let’s walk through it.

1. From the homepage of Bing, click the camera icon to launch the feature. 

2. Point your camera over a barcode; and for books, music, movies, and video games, position the camera over cover art and tap to take a photo.

3. When Bing gets a match, you’ll see “1 result” in the lower corner. 

4. Click on that thumbnail to see product information like descriptions, reviews, prices, and links to merchant websites.  You can even click through to participating merchants to buy the item.

This new barcode scanning feature makes it easy to comparison shop for your favorite products while on the move.

With Bing on your iPhone, we save you time from typing, doing product searches and price comparisons and helps you make better informed shopping decisions.

Enjoy!

Andy Chu -  Bing for Mobile

This week, Microsoft took the wraps off Windows Phone 7, as reviewers have begun publishing in-depth reviews of the new experience from Windows Phone (congratulations to our colleagues over in Windows Phone Team ). Like lots of others at Microsoft, we’re device geeks who couldn’t wait to get our hands on what is shaping up to be an elegant, intuitive experience spanning lots of the common things we all need to get done each day.

Not surprisingly, what excites us the most is what the team has done with Bing on the Windows Phone 7. There have been some very positive reviews of the experience as a whole and it’s great to see how the team’s work integrating a native Bing experience has been received. Here are a few highlights:

· “Bing Search is a beautiful experience on the Windows Phone 7 device with amazing background images, fun trivia associated with the images, and a powerful search/decision engine.” Matt Miller/ZDNet

· “Naturally, Bing and Bing Maps are built into the phone as the default search and maps services. They're nice, smartly contextual, and very location-oriented.” Matt Buchanan/Gizmodo

· “The Bing UI has been neatly brought in line with Microsoft’s Metro design language, and there are numerous neat animation touches.  Zooming out, for instance, eventually flips the map from normal to satellite view, while there’s similarly clever use of zooming to show your own location in relation to search results or destinations. Vincent Nguyen/Slashgear

Here are some screenshots that will give you a feel for Bing on Windows Phone 7.

First, the team delivered nice fidelity to the Bing homepage.

With some common tasks like weather, Windows Phone 7 provides a visually compelling view on weather data from Bing. Notice the beautiful Swiss-inspired typography.

The Windows Phone team included access to some very useful task completion features like flight status answers.

Mapping is well integrated, including elegant navigation for driving or walking.

Windows Phone 7 has a smart experience for finding local listings like restaurants and attractions.

And the team did a beautiful job bringing reviews into the business details.

As you can see, there is lots of cool stuff coming from our friends at Windows Phone. What we can’t show you here is the amazing impact that touch, animation and interaction have on all of these search experiences. Windows Phone 7 is a very different approach to elegant interaction design; it’s almost painful to flatten these designs into screenshots.

It’s great to experience Bing on Windows Phone 7. We can’t wait until these devices are in the market and see what you think.

Erik Jorgensen, Corporate Vice President, Online Services Division

Other posts of interest:

Windows Phone Blog

A Couple of Snacks to Finish the Week

One question that users often ask is how they can find past homepage images.  Sure those arrows let you revisit the last 7 days’ worth of homepages, but what about last month? Well, you asked and we answered.

Today we’re really excited to announce our Bing homepage Visual Search gallery! 

 Now you can go back through previous homepage images to see what you’ve missed or revisit old favorites. And you can sort by a variety of categories, including all the homepages featuring countries in Europe, or every homepage image from space.

 Click on the image you like, and you’ll be taken to a details page where you can learn more about the subject in the photo and see related images. And click “ZOOM IN” for an even larger view!

 On Bing, we bring you a dazzling new homepage photo every day. If you’re new to the homepage, don’t forget to check out Welcome Home for a tour.

 Enjoy!

Stephanie Horstmanshof
Managing Editor

Follow the homepage team on Twitter
Find Bing on Facebook

One of the most significant things our search and advertising platform teams have been working on over the past several months is the preparation and engineering for our search alliance with Yahoo!

When we announced our intention to enter into a search and advertising relationship with Yahoo! almost a year ago, we began a journey that will help us build a scale search advertising marketplace and provide a real competitive alternative for consumers, publishers and advertisers.

Beginning just a few days ago, we began some important testing across both our systems designed to verify our joint work and make sure we are ready to deliver a quality transition for customers, which we are on track to complete in the US and Canada over the next few months. Yahoo has posted an update on this milestone on their blog.

We’ve got a couple of tests going on right now to test both our ability to deliver high performance, quality algorithmic results, as well as power search advertising for both companies. We are working closely with our counterparts at Yahoo! to make sure these tests go well and we learn what we need to ensure a seamless transition. Everything we are doing together is aimed at ensuring the quality of the experience for customers through this transition and into the future.

Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have been communicating with customers and training our respective sales and support organizations so they know what they need to do to prepare for the various transition milestones, including beginning to think about migrating their campaigns to adCenter.

For webmasters, it’s important to be familiar with how the Bing crawler interacts with your site. After the full algorithmic transition is complete, you only need to optimize for one crawler (Bing), as we will provide Yahoo! with results from our index.

During this testing phase, it’s important to look at how your site is showing up in search results on Yahoo! and Bing today, so you can assess if there are any tweaks you need to make or feedback you need to share with the team to make sure your site is accurately represented in Bing’s results.

In particular, now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition.

Remember to check out the Bing Webmaster Center for all the latest info, tips and tools, including some significant updates to Bing’s webmaster tools we are rolling out today.

Thanks for all your help as we enter this exciting time in our search alliance with Yahoo!, we’ll share more detail as we continue to progress through the transition.

Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Online Services Division

Today the Microsoft Research team will be at SIGIR 2010 in Geneva, Switzerland discussing new updates to the Web N-gram service and participating in a number of other workshops as well as a Keynote.

Where you can Find Microsoft at SIGIR:

Keynote: Refactoring the Search Problem to Exploit Difference Between Clients and Servers
Dr. Gary Flake, Microsoft, Director of Live Labs

Workshops:

· Crowd Sourcing for Search Evaluation

· Understanding, Supporting, and Evaluating Personal Data Search

· Query Representation and Understanding

· Web N-gram

The Microsoft Web N-gram service has been in beta since April and researchers, worldwide, have been developing amazing applications using this service. Here is an example featuring Multiword tag clouds developed by Dr. Li Ding from RPI.

We sat down with Kuansan Wang, Principle Researcher from the Microsoft research team to discuss Web N-gram as well as some of the new announcements that are coming from SIGIR:

For more details you can visit the Microsoft External Research blog or visit the newly updated website. Please go and give it a try, and let them know what you think.

Kristin Meldahl – Bing

Other posts of interest:

The Microsoft Research Team + Bing = Endless Possibilities

Helping Researchers Uncover the Secrets of Search

You may have noticed that Bing’s Tuesday homepage was a tribute to a celebration in Japan. We were celebrating as Bing Japan removed its beta tag, launched a new product feature and became a contender in the Japanese search market.

There were many new features to show the crowd but to showcase our focus on entertainment; we hit the city with Yoshimoto Entertainment Company, one of the most prominent celebrity agents in Japan. The fans lined up to attend the launch event and were able to laugh the day away! Yoshimoto’s comedians gave live, impromptu impressions of Bing while highlighting some of their favorite Bing features. The group had a great response to the new homepage, shopping and celebrity information.

So to check out the new Bing features in Japan make sure to set your location as Japan, take a look and let us know what you think. The Bing team is excited about the new product, a smarter, more visual way for Japanese consumers to make choices faster.

Alison Fisher and the Bing Japan Launch Team

Every day students use Bing to learn and explore, so we have a vested interest in seeing them succeed.  Whether that is through providing new tools for teachers and students, sponsoring programs like 10,000 Rockets or through our various partnerships. Recently we have had the opportunity to partner with DonorsChoose.org to help bring funding to classroom projects across the US with programs like the Teacher Appreciation program that just ended as well as with this year’s Earth Day Photo Contest. Today we are excited to be partnering with DonorsChoose.org again and continue our support by giving you a $3 donation code to fund a classroom project of your choice when you choose Bing as your default search provider. Just click here to get started and follow the steps below:  

First, click on the orange box:

Then select “Make this my default search provider”:

Submit your email address to receive the $3 donation code to DonorsChoose.org:

Check your email for the donation code:

Then go to DonorsChoose.org and apply your donation code to the project of your choice.  Make sure you do this as your donation will not happen without this final step:

Just think that this $3 dollars can give a new reader a copy of “The Wizard of Oz”, an inkpad to a budding artist, or four new compasses to young urban explorers. 

Barbara Blanchard – Bing

We are sure by now you have heard, seen or read that NBA player LeBron James will be making a decision as to which NBA team he will choose to play for next season. LeBron will be making his decision on a special program, “The Decision,” which airs live this Thursday, July 8, at 9 pm ET on ESPN. We are excited to be a part of LeBron’s important day and to be the official decision engine of the site LebronJames.com and one of the presenting sponsors of “The Decision” program.

Microsoft has a long-standing relationship with LeBron, including the launch of a website in 2007 – LeBron.msn.com, which was an inspirational, storybook-style Web site for kids and teens, that allowed people to explore his road to athletic achievement, his dedication to basketball and academics, his devotion to his team, friends and family, and his role as a community activist and people’s champion. The site won a Webby, the Internet's version of an Oscar, for "Best Visual Design" in 2007.

Bing offers many features for sports fans, including instant answers for NBA athletes, like LeBron, as well as late-breaking news, video, social search results and more. Bing is thrilled to support LeBron on his journey, and most importantly, raise funds for the Boys and Girl’s Club via our sponsorship of “The Decision”.

Lisa Gurry – Bing, Director

Coming off the heels of the launch of the new Bing Entertainment feature, we're excited to kick off a music-themed summer with an East and West coast concert series, chances to win tickets to private shows and a Lady Gaga fan search contest!

First let's talk Gaga. In honor of the 40th Anniversary of  America's Top 40', we're teaming up with Stubhub and Ryan Seacrest to launch the Lady Gaga Superfan Search.  To enter, upload your best Lady Gaga Superfan photo showing your most fierce Lady Gaga fashion.  The winner will receive the ultimate Lady Gaga prize package – round-trip travel and tickets to one of her shows either in Miami, New York, Las Vegas, or Lollapallooza in Chicago. Go to Bing.com/gaga to learn more details and get inspiration from Bing Visual Search and Bing Video; sample Lady Gaga music; read the latest news on Bing Music; and check out what the social sphere is saying about Lady Gaga.

The lucky Lady Gaga Superfan will be chosen on July 23,, 2010 so make sure to enter soon.  We will also be building a Bing Visual Search gallery of the entrants, so even if you don’t win the grand prize, you’ll still have the chance to show off your Lady Gaga finery online.

And that's not all... last week we kicked off a summer concert series taking place along L.A.’s famous Sunset Strip with Jane’s Addiction and in the lovely resort town of Montauk, NY with Pete Yorn.  We'll be uploading videos from the private show to Bing Video so check back soon for behind the scenes footage of the concert. The concert series will continue through the summer with acts like the Pussycat Dolls and RATT. So how can you get in on the action? There will be chances to win tickets on the Bing Facebook page so stay tuned for those details and if you're not a lucky winner, we've got you covered with continuous coverage on Bing video.

Summer is always a great time to catch a music concert! Be sure to check Bing Music for all your music needs.

Kristin Meldahl – Bing

Other posts of interest:

A New Entertainment Experience for Bing

It’s t-minus 2 days until the Holiday and I’m sure many of you are planning to attend a BBQ or host your own. Whether you’re the host or the guest,  your “to-do” list is probably continuing to grow. Good news! There are many ways that Bing can help you plan for this year’s holiday festivities.

First, will you be inside or out? Check out the weather forecast for your area just by typing the word “weather” into the search box. That’s right, no city name or zip code required, just “weather” and you’ll see an inline instant answer of the local forecast to help you prepare and plan the right attire. Next, what to make? You can find the latest recipes using Bing to search for all of the Fourth of July favorites. And if you are looking for Fourth of July weekend events in your area just search for events in your area and click on the events tab.

For more tips on how to decorate and use Bing to plan for this BBQ season check out our Lifestyle and entertainment expert Kelley Moore’s blog on how to take your summer BBQ from drab to fab.

Kristin Meldahl – Bing

Other posts of interest:

Team Jacob or team Edward?

Kelley Moore’s Roman Holiday with Bing

As we mentioned last week you are now able to discover, experience and buy music right within Bing Entertainment.

You can find the latest songs as well as sample the songs right there inline with the Zune Player. We have even taken it a step further letting you purchase those songs right from the results page through Amazon.com, iTunes or Zune. Zune is also now allowing you to buy these songs with cash in addition to points.

Have you noticed the link that takes you directly to the lyrics of the songs? More than 70 percent of people look for music lyrics online; I know I can recall a time or two where this would have come in handy in the past.

Now if you are a huge fan and want to listen to the music in person we provide an events tab, which lists out the upcoming concert and event info (looks like the Cleveland concert is already SOLD OUT) and there are also tabs that will take you to the latest news, videos, and images of your favorite artist.

Looking for, listening to, and purchasing music online is something that I do often and now having it all within Bing has made it that much easier to really experience music with Bing.

Chris Rayner – Bing Entertainment

Other posts of interest:

A New Entertainment Experience for Bing

Search data indicates that people expect search engines to stay up-to-date on news: 60% of our customers use a search engine to get the details about a news story and 40% say their search engine is their “most important” resource for this key task.  You come to us for world, US, entertainment and local news and you’ve given us feedback that we hadn’t met all of your needs and expectations.   We’ve listened and have launched features that address some of your most critical pain points.

Improving relevance and the freshness of content was at the top of our “to do” list. I’d love to demonstrate the improvements via a link, but it would be out of date as soon as I posted this so you’ll have to let us know next time you search for a breaking story on Bing. We have made improvements to news query intent and the speed with which we index news articles.

We’ve also improved our local news experience. I grew up in a little town in the middle of the corn fields, Watseka, Illinois. Prior to this release Watseka was about as present in Bing News as Brigadoon. I now have my location set to Watseka so when I check my daily headlines, I can also find out about the fascinating happenings in my home town. Now Bing news can tell you what’s going on around you, even if you grew up in a town where today’s top headline is about the new sidewalks.

You will notice other changes on the Bing News homepage as well. You can easily tab through the details on the top stories, see more stories “above the fold” and get the details of local weather. Now it’s the perfect place to start your day: get the headlines, figure out what to wear based on the forecast, and really get into the details on stories that interest you the most.

For instance, let’s say that you are very interested in what Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is doing in Silicon Valley. We’ve revamped our “story page” for those times when you can’t get enough of a specific news event.  As you can see below, there are several stories from different sources shown, initially sorted by best match. But you’ve been following this story all day and you want to know what’s been published since you last looked. You can either sort by “most recent” or look to the right for the most recently published stories. As you can see below the “latest stories” module, we now show you a timeline that indicates how many stories related to this topic were published as the week has progressed as well as how the news has changed. Most recently it looks like Cicso has made a big commitment. Customers have told us that getting the updates as a story progresses can be frustrating no matter where they get the news. This new experience makes it easier to stay fully informed.

Customers also tell us that news stories are one of the scenarios where blog and other social media meet their desire to get all the juicy details – especially for entertainment news.  So let’s find out why Vienna and Jake are breaking up. A search for “Vienna Girardi” gives you the latest news on this story and also allows you to look to see what bloggers are saying and which news stories are most tweeted via Bing Social. I agree with Andy Dehnart though, schadenfreude might be the best part of this story. You can see his quote in the “People in the News” feature under the top stories.

Let us know if you have more ideas for improving Bing News. We’re always interested.

Jacquelyn Krones – Bing, Senior Product Manager

Other posts of interest:

Summer of Shopping

Bringing Timely Data to a Rich Health Search Experience

Investing Decisions Simplified with Bing

Bing Updates up Close

A New Entertainment Experience for Bing

Bing Gets a Fresh Look

Bing for iPhone Update

The Bing Shopping team listened to your feedback and has come back with some exciting updates and new features to Bing Shopping. In addition to the new user interface we made a lot of ‘under the hood’ enhancements that surface more relevant results. Our goal is to make shopping intuitive and easy for you.

Let’s talk about the updates. First off, you’ll l notice that we have helpful new refinements on the left-rail. Expanding from the category, brand and price filters, we have added a ton of relevant filters that help you make better and faster decisions. There is now information on product descriptions and product reviews and ratings, which are rated as most important when searching online for a product so we’ve made it easier for you to sort by these descriptions.

Let’s say you are in the market for a laptop this summer and your budget is between 400-500 dollars. If you are like me, I try and maximize on RAM, using the helpful left hand rail I choose 4GB RAM and within a few clicks I have narrowed my choices from 38,000+ laptops to 3 laptops.

The Black Lenovo G550 really looks interesting!

Discussing what we have just purchased or looking to purchase with our friends and family is something that we do commonly. Using the helpful email link on the Product Summary page I am able to email the Lenovo link to my co-worker Sonam who just bought a laptop for feedback.

He is a gaming enthusiast and replies back to me pointing to the Toshiba Qosmio he just bought using Bing Shopping. I see a link for ‘see larger photo’ and I am able to see the laptop in greater detail:

I scroll down and see helpful links to the product manuals & brochures:

There are also a few other useful features in the Product Summary page including:

· Product Images that we are sourcing straight form the merchant- which saves you a click.

· Free Shipping information which is always nice to know.

· Detailed ratings & reviews sourced from our friends at ResellerRatings.com which help you decide how good the different retailers are.

We hope these updates help you in your buying decisions. We welcome your feedback and input to make Bing your preferred destination for shopping.

Cornelia Carapcea, Program Manager Bing Shopping

Sonam Saxena, Product Manager Bing Shopping

Other posts of interest:

The News About Bing News

Bringing Timely Data to a Rich Health Search Experience

Investing Decisions Simplified with Bing

Bing Updates up Close

A New Entertainment Experience for Bing

Bing Gets a Fresh Look

Bing for iPhone Update

This is a big week for the Bing mobile team. First, not only is our updated iPhone app available in the app store, but we just rolled out a big update for people who want to use Bing from a mobile browser on their high-end smartphones. We all love our apps, but sometimes it’s easier to search from the browser instead of through an app. The good news is that many newer phones have powerful browsers, so Bing (m.bing.com) can look and act like an app without you needing to download or launch one. I’ll describe some of the new features below.

Second, Bing is available as a default option on iPhone 4 and those who upgraded to the iOS 4 software. It’s really easy to reset your search default to Bing. I’ll show you how and you’ll be glad you did.

What’s new at m.bing.com?
(Ok, for those of you who don’t like to read, we asked Raghava Kashyapa to demo some new features for us, check out his video. This could be his shot at a new gig in Hollywood. You decide.)

Try these new features on your Windows phone, iPhone, Android, Palm, Kin, or Zune HD today at m.bing.com:

• The Home page now features the Bing image of the day (people love pictures)

• Location detection through the GPS on your phone (makes it easier to search for stuff near you)

• Local Search with suggested listings nearby and category search (less typing, more finding)

• Find places nearby, save them to a favorites list, and share that list with friends (plan your day all from your mobile phone)

• Smooth panning and scrolling of interactive maps (who doesn’t like a good mobile map these days?)

• More details on local listings, like parking info, price, cuisine, and ratings (that’s just Bing doing what we do, being a decision engine)

One of our favorite enhancements is around local search. When you’re out and about and need to find somewhere to go, you probably want to search near where you are at that moment. The new Local section on m.bing.com does just that. Bing shows you a list of suggestions based their popularity, your current location, and even the time of day so at 9:00 AM you might see a coffee house rather than a bar. You can choose the radius for your search, narrowing to .5 miles for congested areas or when you’re walking instead of driving.

When you find something you like, save it to the new Favorites list. Select a few favorites and show all of them on a single map, or even email the entire list to friends.

How do I set Bing as the search default on my iPhone with iOS 4 installed?

This is easy to do, takes less than a minute and does not require you to be ‘technical.’

1) Tap the “Settings” app (the app with the gears)

2) Scroll down to “Safari” (that’s the iPhone browser)

3) Tap the “Search Engine” button

4) Select Bing

So now that we’ve made it super easy to use Bing on nearly every device and have made some new updates, give it a shot and let us know what you think.

Justin Jed – Bing for mobile

Other posts of interest:

Bing for iPhone Update

The Bing Health search experience is continuing to grow – focusing on providing more data-oriented answers and richer experiences in critical areas of Health. We are continuing to expose more hard-to-discover data in an instant way that helps users make more informed decisions in health. The new features include:

· Tweets from select health publishers in instant answers

· Instant health data tables for common inquiries like blood pressure or cholesterol levels

· Shortcuts to clinical trials for conditions including various cancer types and other major diseases

· New content partners including Harvard Health and the CDC

First, we’re introducing important and filtered Twitter updates from authoritative sources in connection with many medical conditions.  This provides a compelling combination of knowledge and real-time social features in the same rich experience for health searches.

In the example below, the tweet is from the National Psoriasis Foundation, highlighting new research on the connection with arthritis:

Consider now a query like “cholesterol level”. Bing instantly highlights key pieces of information on cholesterol test ranges:

In fact, if you want to know more, you can access directly an article from Mayo Clinic providing detailed explanation of this table’s content.

Another example is the query “CRP test” for the C-Reactive Protein test used as an indicator of heart disease, which leads to an instant visualization of risk categories:

Bing Health will continue to increase the scope of such data-oriented results for users.

Another key direction for Bing Health is providing smart access to highly valuable services, such as clinical trials. For example, clinical trials are an essential tool for cancer patients and there is a strong interest for experimental treatments in complex diseases like the different cancers. To serve people better, Bing Health has developed answers to connect users to the clinicaltrials.gov site maintained by the NIH.

For example, the query “breast cancer clinical trials” leads to not just ten blue links but several in-context focused search pages:

By clicking on “Open Studies”, the user sees the list of clinical trials related to breast cancer that are or will be recruiting new patients according to the NIH database.

From there, users can further explore the available trials or go back to Bing and directly obtain, for example, studies that have published results, by clicking on the “With Results” link.

Bing also provides this search capability automatically in the middle of search results for a number of diseases such as prostate cancer, without requiring users to ask for clinical trials specifically.

In addition, Bing Health has partnered with new authoritative content providers including Harvard Health Publications, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Natural Standard. The following are example pages:

Content from the CDC provides our users with information on important health and prevention factors:

Bing Health is dedicated to innovations that help people get answers and continue to make better informed health decisions.

Please do not hesitate to provide us with your feedback.

Alain Rappaport - Bing

Other posts of interest:

Investing Decisions Simplified with Bing

Bing Updates up Close

A New Entertainment Experience for Bing

Bing Gets a Fresh Look

Bing for iPhone Update

Investing is an area where we have made several improvements to help you make decisions easier. Today we will provide an overview of our new finance features that give a quick view of the market and make it easier to find the right stocks.

Quick view of the market

The newly launched Bing finance landing page gives a snapshot of the market status and the top news in the finance world. There are more news items neatly categorized for easy navigation and are accessible by clicking any of the tabs for a news category. The videos will change to reflect your current selection.

Finding the right stocks

We want to help put the right information at your finger tips so that you find the stocks that best fit your needs. Are you bargain hunter, do you go against what is popular or do you jump on what is hot? Regardless, we make it easy for you to find the stocks that fit your investing style. Are you looking to find stocks based on P/E ratio, Dividend yield, Specific Sector? The new Bing stock screener makes it easy for you to find the right stocks based on multiple of criteria.

You will now notice the new filters on the left navigation which are an easy way to refine your criteria and get to the stocks that interest you based on your investment needs.

Another new feature we added in this release is the analyst ratings. The analyst ratings give a glimpse into what the professionals are thinking about each of the stocks. You don’t have to follow what they say but it’s nice to have that information. This is clearly marked as green (buy), Yellow (hold) or Red (Sell). Now for more details about the stock, click on the ticker symbol which will take you to the revamped Stock details page with near real time quotes.

The recent news about the stock is again neatly organized into categories. This gives an indication of what is happening in the market related to this specific stock. Note the wealth of data we present for each stock. On the top we show the standard daily price info common on most finance sites.

Lower on the page we show a slew of other information for the more advanced investor e.g P/E ratio, revenue per employee etc. This information is often the key drivers for investor decisions. In addition, we show how the stocks are rated by two independent third party rating firms (CAPS and Stock Scouter ratings) and we make it easier to find the right stocks is by compiling a list of stocks that are similar to the one you have selected in the left-hand bar.

Finding and evaluating funds

We have not only provided more detail on Stocks but we have also increased the amount of information on the variety of funds you can invest in. The new release provides detailed information for Indexes, Mutual Funds, ETF (exchange traded funds).

Just type in the symbol you are looking for and Bing will show you a detailed page with key data about the fund as well as a chart that tracks the price movement of the fund. In addition, we show the Morningstar rating and the categorization of the fund.

We wish we could tell you what stocks and funds will go up but that feature is unlikely to launch any time soon. But we hope you use and enjoy these new features and that we can make it easier for you to find the investment vehicle that makes the most sense to you.

Vish Vadlamani - Program Lead Bing Finance

Other posts of interest:

Investing Decisions Simplified with Bing

Bing Updates up Close

A New Entertainment Experience for Bing

Bing Gets a Fresh Look

Bing for iPhone Update

Last night we brought together some leaders in the entertainment industry to discuss how technology is changing the way we interact with media. We also came together to kick off the latest release of Bing with the launch of Bing Entertainment, a destination for all your entertainment searches. As part of our work in this summer release, we also made a significant investment and update in the way we’re visually presenting information with a new user experience. Read more about these updates in yesterday’s blog posts.

As Satya mentioned yesterday the latest release of Bing is aimed at making it easier for you to complete tasks and make better decisions. In addition to our updated user experience and new features around entertainment, we’ve been improving and enhancing our existing verticals to bring you more definitive content in areas such as news, travel, finance, health and more. 

This post will go deeper into the broad range of updates contained in our summer release. Read on for lots of detail, examples and screenshots of the latest updates to Bing. Make sure you check the Bing blog over the next couple weeks as we go even deeper on these updates and new features.

Bing News

69% of people turn to a search engine to find information about news. Bing News helps you find the news stories you care about faster with a fresh new design and news organized by topic. On the top of the page, you will see Quick Tabs that give you easy access to various news topics including World news, Business news, Entertainment news and more. Directly underneath the Quick Tabs, you can see news-related videos, create a news alert, or set up an RSS feed. Bing News also features the top 4 headlines of the day and helps you find the freshest and most credible news sites faster. Local news is a top scenario as well, and so we’ve made it easier to access both local and national news all in one place.

Bing Finance

Bing Finance helps you make finance related decisions by giving you a quick view of the market and giving you tools to find and evaluate stocks and funds. In addition to a visual update with a scrolling ticker bar, we’ve included a stock screener to help you with investment decisions.

Combined Flight Answers

We’ve enhanced the travel experience by combining our flight tools into one simple display. When you search for queries like “flights jfk to sfo” a combined answer appears which includes an airfare deal to your travel destination along with price prediction alongside a flight search form where you can enter your departure dates right on the search results page. Click “find flights” to see the fares to the destination of your choice. Using historical pricing data, Bing will determine whether fares will rise, hold steady, or fall within a certain degree of confidence.

Autosuggest

About 25% of searches are navigational meaning that users want to go directly to a specific website when searching. To help with this task, Bing now has direct navigation to top websites right within the autosuggest drop down. For example, if you type in “Amazon”, you can click on the first autosuggest link and go directly to amazon.com.

In addition to direct navigation, you can now check the weather right within the autosuggest dropdown. This will give you quick, easy access to today’s weather without the need to load a new results page. On average, people check the weather about 3 times per day so we hope to save you time and clicks the next time you’re searching for the forecast.

Visual Search

Bing recently got more social and we’re continuing on that road with the release of a new Visual Search gallery of the top twitter users. See who has the most followers and the most tweets. Or, see which occupations have the most twitter users by refining your search using the filters on the left-hand side.

So there you have it, a deeper look into a number of updates for Bing that we hope will help you complete tasks and make better decisions. You can also get more information at the just updated http://www.Discoverbing.com site. There you can learn about the product, explore Bing’s great features through slideshows and videos, learn all about Bing Entertainment, find out how to set Bing as your default, and connect more deeply with Bing in a number of ways. Come back to the Bing Blog over the next few weeks to learn even more about the features in this summer updates. In the meantime, go to Bing, check them out, and let us know what you think! 

Todd Schwartz – Bing Director

Other posts of interest:

Investing Decisions Simplified with Bing

Bing Updates up Close

A New Entertainment Experience for Bing

Bing Gets a Fresh Look

Bing for iPhone Update