Since its launch Bing has been consistently adding new services. Since June they’ve released a bunch of new stuff to try and meet the demands of users including Twitter integration, Visual Search, Twitter Search, better maps, and a host of user interface and index improvements.
Below we take a look at a few of the latest additions
Launched on November 11, Bing Video is touted as providing a new unified online video destination that delivers a comprehensive, organised, and high-quality video experience. This change will combine the powerful search experience of Bing, with the expertise of MSN video all into one destination.
With the New Bing Video you can now access videos from across the web, MSN’s array of high-quality videos, and videos from sites such as Hulu, ABC, and Youtube. Bing videos viewing options are nearly endless.
You can check out the new home page here, which Bing says makes it easy to search and browse for the videos you want to see.
They have also added a new viewing experience, which offers the ability to share videos and a dim the lights feature – should make for some great viewing online.
While it doesn’t appear that anyone in Australia can figure out how to actually independently list their business yet (I am open to someone proving me wrong here), Bing Maps Australia has launched with what looks like all references coming from “Listings By Yellow”.
Hopefully in future updates, Bing will integrate other sources, e.g. Hot Frog, True Local, Start Local, etc. as well as offering businesses the ability to add their own details independently.
Some of the applications you can expect to experience right now include:
Search
You are able to search via Businesses (Category or business name) and Locations.
Draggable Routes:
You are now able to generate a route, and change it, simply by grabbing and dragging it to where you want the route to go. To use draggable routes, click the directions link in the welcome pane or the car icon near the bottom of the welcome pane. Enter a start and end, generate a route, then grab anywhere on the route to move the route line. The route will regenerate for you.
New Navigation:
There is now a subset of features on the button bar along the bottom of the welcome pane.
- “Welcome” loads the welcome pane
- “Car” loads driving directions
- “Star” loads My Places, formerly called Collections
- “Envelop” loads the ability to share the map with someone via email, copy a URI or embed the map into a web page
- “Printer” is for printing
- “Traffic light” will load the traffic overlay
You can now search for what people are saying all over the web about breaking news topics, your favorite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today.
The search results on people’s tweets will show up like this:
If you want to keep an eye on a topic, you can just watch the Tweets roll in. Or, click on “See more Tweets about…” to go to a page full of Tweets. On that page, you can change the ordering to “Best Match.” Here they arrange Tweets differently. If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower. For example, I saw a Tweet from ABC News ranked pretty high in the Best Match mode during the “boy in the balloon” fiasco.
By the way, you won’t see any of your tweets if you protected or deleted them, and tweets don’t last more than 7 days in the Bing Twitter Search index.
