Bing My Saves launches
Microsoft announced a couple of days ago that it added a new feature called My Saves to its Bing Search engine expanding the Bing Saves feature that it launched in 2014.
My Saves, as the name suggests already, lets you save certain types of content so that you can access these saves at a later point in time or on other devices.
The feature is linked to a Microsoft Account which means that you need to sign in before it becomes available on Bing.
The current iteration of My Saves supports the saving of images, videos, shopping results and places.
Bing My Saves
To add an entry to the saves, simply hover over an appropriate result, say an image or video, and click on the plus icon that is displayed in a small overlay. The plus icon may also be displayed next to an item instead of on it when you hover it.
This saves the item to the My Saves page on Bing. You can access the page directly, or by clicking on the menu icon in the top right on Bing and selecting "My saves" from the context menu.
While this works well for most supported items, you will notice that the plus icon is not displayed for some results.
That's without doubt the biggest restriction of the feature right now. You can't save regular web results to My Saves, and the saving won't even work for part of the image results as well.
My Saves vs Bookmarks
My Saves is a bookmarking service at its core. You save items while using Bing to store them and get the chance to access them at a later point in time.
The items that you have saved are displayed directly as media files on the My Saves page.
The data is linked to a Microsoft Account so that you may access it again on any device without need for third-party add-ons or synchronization.
The downside to using My Saves is that it restricts what you can save to My Saves. You cannot save textual links, and only some image links can be saved.
Another restriction is that My Saves offers no search interface and no option to sort results into categories or folders. If you use it heavily, you will end up with a large list of image and video thumbnails that you cannot manage in any meaningful way (the only option you have is to remove items right now).
Closing Words
It is easy to overlook My Saves on Bing. The reason for this is that it is only available if you sign in to a Microsoft Account, and that the "add icon" is only displayed for select results and not all of them.
The feature is less powerful than browser bookmarking, but it may appeal to some Bing users nevertheless.
Now You: What's your take on My Search?
Pointless indeed. Simply saving things yourself or keeping some temporary bookmarks is just as handy, and a whole lot more flexible.
The only real point here is that this allows not you, but rather Microsoft to save something. This way, they can keep a more exact account of what topical searches were of real interest to you (that is, important enough for you to save the result). Meaning they can sell advertisers an even more fine-tuned user profile of you!
Another related point lurks in the background. Microsoft is heavily pushing users to use Microsoft’s own cloud functions because these require you to log in with a Microsoft account. This makes it much easier for them to track your activities and to profile you. For example, this is also why they made it so hard to find the almost-hidden option to install and use Windows without linking it to a Microsoft account.
I predict that as part of this policy, in the next years Microsoft will try to take ever more existing functions and replace them by new “improved” functions like this one. These may offer little real advantage for the user, but unlike the old functions they will now require the user to keep himself logged in with his traceable Microsoft account.
The end goal might well be a kind of Windows that is deliberately left crippled for those users who do not want to be tracked and identified by a Microsoft account.
@ Henk van Setten
Your post is an excellent summary of Microsoft’s future plans to monetize users.
That’s why i stayed with Win7. It is also the reason why I do not have accounts with Microsoft, Google,Twitter, etc.
I will never use cloud storage because 1) it is hackers heaven and 2) ALL personal data is at the mercy of whoever is providing the “facility”.
Finally, on line banking is a definite no no because of all the scams and hacks aimed at parting you from your money.
I’ll definitely check it out! Thanks for the heads up – I’d never heard of it!
How utterly pointless. Seems like just another form of telemetry badly disguised as an absolutely useless ‘feature.’ I really wish all of these smart open source people would create an OS – one capable of running programs that work on Windows – the only reason many of us don’t/can’t switch to Linux.
I would switch from Windows in a heart beat, if only the two major programs I use would work on Linux.
For now I will continue to dual boot, using Windows only for 2 applications and nothing more. I don’t like the privacy crap Microsoft has pulled.
The smart open source people are already trying to do that since 2003. The OS is called ReactOS and has had a couple of releases already.
(I do have a few apps running under Wine on Linux without any tweaks at all, but I know there’s a lot of apps that do require tweaking so ReactOS might be more appealing to you)
Hello geeks,
this sound good but does these saves works on offline or does anybody knows ,Is there is any such options in IE or Edge or Mozilla or in Chrome that can read offline store articles ? Many thanks for suggestions from Tbilisi.
Chrome for Android has such a feature: https://www.ghacks.net/2016/09/01/chrome-for-android-gets-page-download-option/