New York — Bing Shopping, available to US users, has revealed some new enhancements and features to it’s Shopping search engine designed to accelerate and simplify the product-finding process to the experience recently, according to a blog post on the Bing Search blog.
Recently unleashed Bing Shopping’s filter preference narrows results according to criteria like product category, brand and style, which previously were only displayed on the results page, will now also appear on the fly in a drop-down list below the search box as people type in queries. These include the ability to refine your searches faster, product-level deals, product page filters and shopping list improvements.
“As the number of available product grows, we want to make sure you are able to quickly find the information that is most relevant to you,” Bing says on its search blog. “Today the site includes filters on the left side of the page to help narrow down your search results by category, brand and price point. While these filters are excellent, you have to click through to the results page before you can start using them. To solve this problem, we removed a step and added the refinements directly to the search box. Now you can select as few or as many of the refinements as you want.”
The first of these enhancements incorporates Bing Shopping’s category filters (positioned on the left hand side of the page) with the search box itself. Now, when shopping for certain high volume items (we found it worked for shoes, laptops, tvs, etc.), you will get the filtered results right in the search box:
Microsoft anticipates that these modifications will help shoppers fine-tune their searches more quickly, even before they execute the query and are taken to the results page, the company said on Monday.
Thus, when you click on a result within the search box, that filter will be filled in the search result:
“In addition to ‘refining on the fly’, we have also included product-level deals to the site,” Bing says. “Now when you search for products on the site, if a discounted price is available, it will be displayed next to the listing. To help you find deals, we added an inbuilt ‘price reduced’ filter under the price refinement allowing you to quickly filter results to only show the products with price reductions.”
Besides, expanding the number of available products and adding top brands like Nordstrom, ESPN, Sony Store, and more. Microsoft also expanded the scope of Bing Shopping’s lists, which users can create and share with their contacts on popular social media network Facebook.
Previously, Bing users could only create a single Shopping list, but now they can compose multiple lists. Also, Bing users can now share a Shopping list with a subset of their contacts, whereas before they had to share the list with all their friends. Additionally, Bing has also enhanced the home page experience at www.bing.com/shopping, revamping many of the browse pages just in time for back-to-school shopping:
Nevertheless, Microsoft has been trying for years to level the search playing field through heavy investment in Bing and via high-profile partnerships, like its search deal with Yahoo and custom integration with social media giant Facebook, but Google remains dominant in search advertising and usage. In the U.S. in July, Google grabbed a 65.1 percent share of search queries, followed in a very distant second place by Yahoo with 16.1 percent and by Bing in third place with 14.4 percent, according to comScore.