Bing Just Got a Whole Lot Smarter
Bing search is getting some intelligent new features today. Microsoft is adding some neat improvements to the search engine to make it easier for users to look for hotels, etc.
Bing’s hotel booking experience is getting revamped to offer a more convinient feature for users. When you select a hotel that you are about to book, Bing will now display similar, but higher-rated hotels near you at the same rate to help you save money. It also now shows you historical price trends for a hotel, so you can save a few bucks by checking-in a day later, or earlier. Bu the new hotel comparison feature is really powerful — it breaks down all the crucial features you need on a hotel, and compare them against other hotels. You can compare things like how many attractions are nearby, or how far they are, as well as the things like breakfast availability, airport distance, and prices.
And for those who look for coupons and deals before making a purchase, Bing is getting smarter there, too. Bing will now display crucial information like whether the offers are online or in-store only, or whether they are expiring soon, etc. Bing already shows the different discounts you can get before even clicking on a link, so it’s getting really helpful when combined with the new insights.
The last area where Bing is getting improved is an interesting one: home services. Bing is partnering with Porch, a service that helps you find professionals for home services, to help surface better results within search. It will now show you things like cost ranges, which are meant to help find a “fair” or the average cost for a certain service based on your location. It will also now let you get a quote for supported home service providers from within search.
Bing isn’t saying whether advertisers will be prioritized in any of these search features, though that seems quite unlikely. It’s possible you’ll continue to see paid search results on top of the search results, but that shouldn’t impact any of the new features like the hotel comparison tool.