Searching for products that you may want to buy on Internet search engines can be a rather confusing experience. Searching on the main page can bring up links to reviews and news items but sometimes you need to go to a separate shopping tier to search for actual prices and links to retail websites.
Today, Microsoft announced it is rolling out a new shopping experience on Bing. In a post on the Bing blog, the company said that the search engine's index of "tens of millions of individual products" combined with Bing's algorithms and machine learning will allow for more relevant results to be displayed on the main search page, rather than going to a "shopping" section.
Microsoft offered up an example of how this will work:
Simply enter “dslr camera” and you will see a category snapshot with the top dslr cameras. You might have heard about a specific Canon model, you click on the Canon EOS 6D and you will see our new Carousel so you can quickly browse other related products that might be of interest and then narrow down the selection that best meets your needs.
Microsoft's Snapshot info boxes on the right side of the search results will also offer information about specific products such as hardware specs and features. In terms of actual shopping results, Bing will offer pricing and availability of products in the main search results from retailers in what Microsoft calls Rich Captions. It adds, "Another way Bing helps is through new product ads with photos and pricing that provide you the ability to quickly see offers from merchants across the web." More information on Rich Captions and product ads can be found on the Bing Ads blog.
Microsoft says it will be a few months before the new product search features on Bing will become finalized, and in the meantime the current Bing shopping category will remain active.
Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft
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