Bing Redesign Part 2, Boosts Social, Relevancy

Martin Brinkmann
May 10, 2012
Updated • Sep 16, 2018
Microsoft, Search
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If you have been to Bing recently you may have noticed the new minimal design of the search engine when compared to before. This move was apparently only the first step in the redesign of the Bing search engine.

The Bing team has just announced that it will be rolling out the second part of the planned redesign of the search engine in the coming days for users from the United States.

Users from other countries can switch to the U.S. engine on Bing to use the features. It is not clear if and when this redesign will launch for localized versions of Bing as well. On a side note: If you ask me, Bing's U.S. focused policy is one of the things that is keeping the search engine from gaining any sort of visible traction in other countries, and especially in countries where English is not the native language.

Update: Note that the article provides information about Bing's redesign efforts in 2012. The current version of Bing has a two column design that displays search results and important information in a wide column and related information in a column to the right. End

The new Bing introduces a three column layout, that feels shifted to the right, by quite a bit. The main column remains the same, and the new columns that get introduced are the center column which Bing calls Snapshot and the sidebar.

Snapshot, according to the announcement, "brings relevant information and services related to your search to you right on the main results page". This may include maps and reviews, or options to make reservations at a hotel from the results page. These services and information can be first party or third party, as Bing is cooperating with businesses for that.

The sidebar on the other hand, that is the dark area that you see on the screenshot above, is reserved for social. Good news is, Bing has removed the majority of social information in the main search results. It is however not really clear if the sidebar will be displayed to all Bing search engine users, or only to users who are logged into their Facebook account, and have linked that account to Bing.

With the sidebar, logged in users can "post a question to get help from [...] Facebook friends", friend suggestions that you may want to ask, people you may know, and also see their activity feed right in the sidebar.

What's your take on the redesign of Bing? I personally could care less about the social integration, and hope that it is only displayed to logged in users.

One interesting take away is that test users seem to find Bing's search results more relevant than that of Google. Google beat Bing by 4% in a first study conducted in January, while 43% of users preferred Bing in a more recent study, while only 28% favored Google results. This study has to be taken with a grain of salt, as we do not know anything about methodology for instance.

Still, this goes in line with my own observations that the quality on Google is deteriorating. Your take? Lets discuss it in the comments.

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Comments

  1. Some Dude said on March 19, 2023 at 11:42 am
    Reply

    Are these articles AI generated?

    Now the duplicates are more obvious.

    1. boris said on March 19, 2023 at 11:48 pm
      Reply

      This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.

  2. Paul(us) said on March 20, 2023 at 1:32 am
    Reply

    Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
    1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
    2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro

    Why oh why?

    1. Clairvaux said on September 6, 2023 at 11:30 am
      Reply

      Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?

  3. John G. said on August 18, 2023 at 4:36 pm
    Reply

    Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.

    Special event by they is a special crap for us.

  4. yanta said on August 18, 2023 at 11:59 pm
    Reply

    If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
    Better brands at better prices elsewhere.

  5. John G. said on August 20, 2023 at 4:22 am
    Reply

    All new articles have zero count comments. :S

  6. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 7:48 am
    Reply

    WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
    It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage

    I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one

  7. St Albans Digital Printing Inc said on September 5, 2023 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.

  8. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 12:47 pm
    Reply

    What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?

    1. GG said on September 6, 2023 at 8:24 am
      Reply

      Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.

      I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.

      And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?

      Nope, just charge the customer twice.

      Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.

  9. d3x said on September 5, 2023 at 7:33 pm
    Reply

    When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?

  10. Scroogled said on September 5, 2023 at 10:47 pm
    Reply

    Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.

  11. ard said on September 7, 2023 at 4:59 pm
    Reply

    For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
    quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
    unquote

    so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.

  12. Andy Prough said on September 7, 2023 at 6:52 pm
    Reply

    >”Now You: what is your theory?”

    That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.

    Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.

  13. TelV said on September 8, 2023 at 12:04 pm
    Reply

    Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.

  14. Anonymous said on September 18, 2023 at 1:23 pm
    Reply

    The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.

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