The New Bing Box, A Foursquare Map App, And Other Search Goodies
March 25, 2010 at 08:30 AM EDT
Today, Bing is announcing more refinements to its search engine. The most noticeable one is what Bing director Stefan Weitz unofficially calls the "Bing Box." For popular search categories such as celebrities, cities, companies, musicians, movies, places, and sports, the top result will be the Bing Box, which will pull in an image and a link to the official site, along with some relevant data. For pop music star Lady Gaga, it might be concert dates and realtime Tweets. For "Miami Beach," it might be a thumbnail of a map, the current weather, flight deals, and a list of neighborhoods. The Bing Box is similar to Google's Universal Search Onebox that pulls in images and results from different vertical search categories and places it at the top of the search results page. But the Bing Box packages the data in a slightly different manner. "That center search pane with a bunch of links is going to change," predicts Weitz.