Redmond, Washington — Relentlessly striving to popularize its social sidebar, following a its arch rival, Microsoft’s Bing is once again dipping its toes into a form of what Google calls “authorship” has just announced that it has launched a new section for the Bing sidebar to showcase journalists, writers and authors of news stories.
According to a post on the Bing blog, now, when you search for any given subject on Bing, along with the Facebook-powered social results, authors who regularly write articles related to your query will appear alongside other experts and enthusiasts in the sidebar. Also, when you hover over the person’s name to learn more about them, see their top articles related to your query, or link to their Twitter page.
Going forward, U.S.-based searchers’ can now see journalists appearing in the “People Who Know” section of the Bing sidebar. These authors are often mixed in with those who appeared in “People Who Know” before — people who have responded to questions on Quora or who tweet regularly about the search topic.
Besides, “Much of the information we consume and search for relates to current events,” says the Bing Team, “and the most current and accurate information often comes from news articles.” Starting today, Bing will put emphasis on these authors in the “People Who Know” section of the sidebar.
Image Credit: (TechCrunch)
Also, the sidebar empowers Bing users to see all of a writer’s articles by clicking on the aptly named “See all articles” link. Moreover, “Bing’s sidebar helps connect you to these types of people; people who are more intelligent on the topic you are searching for including friends you know and experts and enthusiasts you may or may not be familiar with,” says Nathan Penner, Senior Program Manager for the Bing News Team.
According to Bing, the team is “just beginning to surface the countless number of authors out there to build this feature, so while we would not have author pages for everyone, we are constantly working to grow our coverage so stay tuned.”
Besides, Bing does not mention any markup for authors to implement the way Google does. It does appear to be relying primarily on Twitter for its author info.
On the other hand, Google’s authorship feature has been showing author images in search results since the summer of 2011. These results also include a link to the writer’s Google+ profile and a link to a list of all of the author’s articles. Google is officially still piloting this program, but it is pretty easy for authors to add their names to the list. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to be more interested in manually curating a list of “experts in their field.”