Bing Gets Design And Layout Changes

Search engines are constantly evolving, a recent trend puts related searches and information on the search result pages to provide searchers with additional options and direct answers of their search queries.

The Bing team announced yesterday that the layout and design of Bing search has been changed for all users. The most obvious change is a placement change of the Quick Tabs bar. Quick Tabs are links to query relevant search results, e.g. Images, News and Videos, a search filter so to speak.

The Quick Tabs bar has been moved to the top of Bing pages just below the search form and above the search results.

Selecting a tab in the results changes not only the search results that are displayed but also the related information in the sidebar. A search for Firefox will display the standard Bing search results for the browser. A switch to the Wikipedia tab displays the Wikipedia entry about Firefox right on the Bing page.

The Bing developers have also made specific changes to certain types of searches, specifically when searching for entertainment, autos and finance related topics.

Searching for specific songs in Bing displays a Lyrics Quick Tab which, when clicked on, displays the lyrics of the song in the Bing interface.

Bing has integrated additional information about artists including photos, videos and tour dates that are easily accessible from the Quick Tabs bar. US users will also have access to the five million songs of the Zune library with 30 seconds previews of every song available.

Games have been integrated into Bing as well. About 100 different games can be played directly in the search engine, a search for Bejeweled and other popular games yields a Play Now button to play the game directly in Bing.

Similar additions have been made to TV show and movie searches providing search engine visitors with additional information right in the results.

Auto specific searches now display a specs quick tab that lists vehicle specific information directly in the search engine.

Finance searches lastly have been extended by a lot. A click on the Finance quick tab link when searching for finance related information displays heaps of direct information.

The Bing search engine is evolving just like Google Search, Yahoo or Ask. The changes should be helpful for a lot of searchers. Some webmasters on the other hand might dislike that trend as it reduces their exposure in those sectors tremendously. Who for example needs a lyrics website if the search engine displays all the lyrics directly?

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