Tag: Bing

The holidays can be a busy time, but at Bing we hope to make your holiday season easier and more enjoyable! Today we’re excited to announce an advanced flight booking experience as well as expanded visual search shopping scenarios.
 

Flight booking answer

One area we’re seeking to make more frictionless for our users is flight booking. Finding flights can be time-consuming, confusing, and involve searches across various websites, particularly during the holidays.

To solve this, we partnered with flight booking sites to provide a comprehensive booking experience in one place on Bing, so you can browse relevant results with accurate prices and minimal wait time. This new experience also leverages real-time data from the world’s leading Global Distribution Systems, and direct integration with top airlines to ensure a seamless experience for Bing users, from searching and comparing flights to booking them in one place. 

For example, if you’re looking for a Vegas getaway for the holidays, simply search for the trip you’d like to make, such as ‘flights from New York to Las Vegas’, and go from there.
 

 
If you click on a flight option to learn more about it, you’ll be taken to our comprehensive deep-dive page, which includes filtering options to allow you to quickly narrow the options down to the flight of your choice based on number of stops, airline, departure and arrival time, and price.
 

 
When you’ve found the option you want, you can click through right to a booking site to finalize your flight.
 

Visual search from more places in Windows

We’re also excited to let you use Bing’s existing visual search features in more places than ever before. Visual search lets you search using an image, so you can find what you’re looking for even when you don’t know what words to use.

We already have features that allow you to get visually-similar images from within Bing image results. Now, we’ve expanded and streamlined this capability so you can also use Bing visual search capabilities wherever you are, such as on third-party retailer site or in your own existing photos.

For example, imagine you’re holiday shopping on a retailer’s website or a home decor blog and see a couch you really like. Simply use the search bar in Windows, click the ‘Search with a screenshot’ icon in the lower right corner, and take a capture of the furniture that caught your eye.^[1] Bing will provide visually-similar products from various retailers at diverse price points.^[2]
 

 
Visual search also works from photos you already have in Windows (for example, if you have a picture of a pair of boots you’d like to replace). Just find the picture you like in the Photos app, open it, then right-click and click “Search the web with image”. In the newest Photos app, available to a percentage of our users today, it’s even easier – just click the “Search the web with image” action in the toolbar.
 

Please note you must be updated to Windows 10 May 2019 Update or newer to see these features. You can learn more about this feature here.
 

Rewards

As always, searching on Bing when you’re signed in allows you to earn Rewards points. You can redeem these points for gift cards or choose to donate your points to support the charities you care about most. 

We hope you’re as excited by these feature as we are, and hope you have a great holiday season!

[1] This feature is rolling out to users in the U.S. first with international markets to follow shortly after.
[2] Shopping results are only available to users in the United States and United Kingdom.

There is an old saying that you don’t know where you are going until you get there. With Bing Maps new route coloring feature, you will know right away where the delays will be along your selected route so you can change your route, your plans or your destination based on the route ahead!

For example, if you are leaving Redmond Town Center for Westlake Center in Seattle, you can see the delays on WA-520 W and I-90 W before you decide which route to take. Also, with our new route labels showing the travel mode, distance and time of each route, you can easily compare and toggle between the different routes quickly on the map.

While blue means no traffic delays, the orange and red colors highlight moderate to heavy traffic delays on the route. These are calculated based on a combination of current traffic updates and predictions from historic data depending on the length of the route.

Traffic coloring not only helps you select the best route for your trip, but can also be very useful when there are major traffic delays due to inclement weather, big events, accidents, or road construction nearby. For example, if there is an MLB or NFL game in town, you can avoid the most impacted roads near the event and choose an option that offers the least delays.

In addition, if you need to take a ferry as part of your route, Bing Maps visualizes the ferry segments using dashes to differentiate that part of the trip. The image below illustrates the route between Bellevue and Bainbridge Island in Washington State. Bing Maps highlights the ferry segment between Seattle and Bainbridge with a dashed line.

The Bing Maps Routing and Traffic Team is constantly working to make navigation and route planning easier for our users. To try out the traffic coloring feature, go to https://www.bing.com/maps.

 – Bing Maps Team

Intelligent shopping

We know that often, shopping can be a journey. You might start with a need in mind, or a few products you want to learn about. To end up with a great purchase, you need the right tools to guide you along the way. To make your holiday shopping easier, we’ve embedded Bing artificial intelligence algorithms into parts of our shopping experience to deliver results that are both relevant and organized, to help you make the most efficient purchasing decision.

 

Black Friday

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner, we want to make sure you have access to the best deals across many of the top retailers—without the stress of having to clip coupons.

We’ve designed browsable Black Friday infographics, organized and categorized for shopping convenience from your desktop or phone. Search our repository for a specific store to find the best prices for the items you are looking for, and Bing automatically extracts deals from the flyer image.

Our Black Friday experience highlights important info, such as how long an offer lasts, nearby stores, or other ongoing promotions, so that you never miss a bargain this holiday season. To find Back Friday details from our regular Bing shopping tab, simply search on “Black Friday” and the name of the store or item you are searching for. 

 

Also, keep an eye on this page after Black Friday as we’re adding more stores, more offers, and different promotions throughout the holidays. 

Phone comparisons

We know that smartphones are one of the most common, and most expensive, purchases made during the holiday, and Black Friday is often the peak time for product deals. With so many different options available on the market today, it can be tough to understand the differences between each model to find the one best suited to your needs. 

Comparison shop with Bing by searching, for example, “iPhone x vs Samsung galaxy s9” and Bing serves up information from authoritative sources such as ratings, expert reviews, and product highlights to accurately compare a variety of different product models in a way that’s easy to digest and browse.

Product insights 

With so many new products and devices available during the holidays, even shopping online can become overwhelming. We want to help you better understand the buzz around new products, as well as the key features, ratings, and reviews to make an informed and stress-free purchasing decision. Simply type what you are looking for into Bing, such as “best laptops,” and you’ll see the product insights synthesized for you automatically.

Happy shopping!

Whether you’ve been planning for Black Friday since July or are more of a last-minute shopper, we hope that Bing’s intelligent features will help you make more efficient and stress-free decisions this holiday season—saving you time and money. 

Stay tuned for more features as the holidays progress.

This October, we’re excited to announce several new features at Bing.

Multi-perspectives on ballot initiatives

With the midterm election a week away, we want to make it as easy as possible to find the information you are looking for about measures on the ballot.  

 

We try hard to make well-educated decisions when we vote, but we live in a world overloaded with information. With Bing’s multi-perspective answer, we hope to help voters understand the full range of arguments for or against key propositions by clearly presenting and summarizing the main arguments on each side.

For example, Colorado voters can stay up to date on Proposition Y (redistricting limitations), or Proposition 111 (payday lending practices) while voters in Florida can view for and against arguments for Amendment 9 (offshore drilling) and Amendment 4 (felons’ voting rights).

Covering more than 75 measures nationwide, Bing gives voters the information they are looking for before heading to the polls on November 6.

A new way to view and browse images

We’ve updated the UX of the image detail page on Bing desktop to more easily highlight new and relevant information about images you click on. For example, if you’re searching for images of food, Bing will automatically find recipes associated with that image, presenting the information in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Looking for outfits or costumes? Bing will help you find related product pages where you can purchase the item you are looking for. The intention behind these changes it to make it easier than ever to find relevant information and inspiration for your image-based searches. 

We’ve also extended these UX changes to our new visual search results page, where you can search using an image as an input. Whether you’ve uploaded an image yourself or are browsing the web, Bing’s object detection features can help you more easily zoom in on particular parts of the image which you might want to search, learn more about, or buy. 

NFL expanded 

With the NFL season in full swing, we’ve come up with even more ways for football fans to stay on top of their game. No matter what information you’re looking for, Bing presents a comprehensive picture of each game with stats, schedules, viewing information, injury reports, news, and even predictions.

Additionally, Bing’s pre-game insights provide specialized notes that guide both new and experienced football fans on the history of the teams and the matchup, as well as what to watch for in the current showdown. 

Word of the day

Finally, as we’re approaching the new year—we want to give everyone a fun and easy opportunity to expand their vocabulary. Bing’s new word of the day is simple way to expose yourself to new words and concepts. Learn the featured word’s meaning, pronunciation, and see the word in context. You can also navigate through the words for the past week to catch up on words you may have missed. 

Tomorrow’s word? That’s a surprise! 

 

We value your feedback

As always, we value your perspective, and one of the best ways for you to provide it is via the Bing Insider Program, which gives our users the opportunity to provide feedback to Bing engineers and partner teams via monthly calls, Insider events, interactive feedback sessions, and more.

Please register here to become a Bing Insider. Even if you don’t join today, the website is full of great content featuring our Insiders as well as new Bing features. We hope you enjoy the new site and come back often.

Being an informed consumer of the news is more challenging today than it used to be. We live in a busy world where dozens of headlines compete for our attention every day. On top of that, it’s difficult to know if you’re getting all sides of a story or just leaning into an echo chamber, and it can feel like a full-time job to seek out various points of view.

At Bing, we want to empower users to get an overview of the news in less time. That’s why we built the Bing spotlight that provides overviews of news topics that you can see right in the Bing search results when you search for major developing news stories.

Spotlight shows users the latest headlines, a rundown of how the story has developed over time, and relevant social media posts from people around the web. Spotlight also shows diverse perspectives on a given topic so users can quickly get a well-rounded view on the topic before deciding what they want to go deeper on and read by clicking on any of the articles.

Spotlight is currently available on Bing desktop and mobile web in the US.

Hotel booking

 

Home services pricing and scheduling

 

 

Coupons and deals