Bing

Bing revealed that of all the searches on Bing, people searches account for 10 percent, which is the second highest percentage after navigational queries. Keeping this in account, Bing has updated Bing Snapshot with people autosuggest feature. It will provide searchers with the thumbnail image and a brief description of the individuals related to the people searches.

Bing has added two new features into the Bing Webmaster Tools. The first feature will enable site owners to see more details on the malware issues that are impacting their site. They will further be able to submit a malware re-evaluation request. The next addition enables site owners to geo-target specific pages, directories, or the entire site within Bing Webmaster Tools.

More on Bing Malware Re-Evaluation

Bing re-launches the Bing Business Portal with a new name, "Bing Places for Business". The change will not do much with listings, other than moving the location of where you managed your business Bing Maps listing to bing.com/places.

Some of the features that were available in the Bing Business Portal have also been removed. These include:

• Ability to create deals
• Features to add coupons

Bing has introduced a new feature aimed to make "Pinning" to Pinterest easy. 

The new feature "Pin to Pinterest" allows users to pin a Bing image search result directly to their Pinterest board.

In May 2012 Bing added the “Snapshot” feature to its search which allowed users to get answers at a glance in the middle column of the Bing search result page. Dr. Richard Qian, a significant member of the Bing team explains that this feature has been, “designed to develop deep understanding of the world around us not only as a collection of entities (people, places and things) but also the relationships between those entities. Inside the Bing engineering team, we call this technology Satori, which means understanding in Japanese.”

A new tool addition in Bing will make it easier for webmasters who are moving sites. Whether a webmaster is moving URL structure internally or replacing the complete address of the site, the new Site Move tool in Bing Webmaster Tools will help with the entire procedure. It is very similar to a 301 redirect. This new Site Move tool helps in conveying the message to Bing that a webmaster is permanently changing URLs from one specific location to another. The new tool is available under Diagnostic and Tools section of Bing Webmaster Tools. 

Bing has introduced two improvements to auto suggestions that have made searching quicker and more accurate. Bing engineers have brought this subtle change through a technique they refer to as ‘Autosuggest Ghosting’.

Ghosting is an algorithm to pre-populate the query with the terms that are most likely to be used in the search box. The suggestion will be the blue highlighted text in the search box while the alternatives will be listed below. Users can tab or press the down arrow to access these suggestions and select these as the search term.

Bing has made it very easy for webmasters to create XML sitemap for search engines.  They have introduced Bing Sitemap Plugin, an open source servicer side beta program that allows users to generate not one but two sitemaps.

The Plugin generates a comprehensive sitemap of all URLs seen in server traffic and a delta sitemap of URLs that have changed recently. XML sitemaps can be generated for websites running on Apache as well as IIS.

Like any other online industry, Bing, is also constantly updating its product to make it more appealing to the users. Their most recent update allows a user to discover and browse through friend's Facebook photos with much ease and an increased user experience.