Redmond, Washington — In an attempt to fend off its rivals, Microsoft’s Bing announced a new “Action Buttons” in search results, albeit minor feature that has the potential to save its users seconds per search across a variety of queries, but what it implies is interesting.
Dubbed as “Action Buttons,” alongside queries for seven genres of search term (airlines, couriers, restaurants, banks, rental cars, software downloads, and hotels), basically suggest common actions performed on the site.
These are buttons on certain types of search results that have been placed to guide the user to the page that they want directly, instead of the homepage of the website in question.
Think about things like checking into a hotel or a flight, checking on a flight status, booking a flight, renting a car, etc., which would enable you to engage in specific actions related to that result.
“Now when you search across 7 popular categories — including airlines, couriers (e.g. FedEx), restaurants, banks, rental cars, software downloads and hotels — you will be presented with buttons for top actions on the site, that directly take you to the page where you can fulfill your task,” explains Bing Program Manager Deepak Vijaywargi.
The Bing community blog has two examples for that: First, to give you an example, a search results for “United Airlines” (see image below) would present three buttons to the right of the usual results that could include “Check in,” “Flight status” and “Book a flight”.
Thus, by offering searchers with a simple way to go directly to the page that they want, instead of to an (often cluttered) main page, Bing might be able to save its users small but useful amounts of time. This is what it looks like:
The second example is for a car rental firm and the action buttons Rent a car, Locations and Contact us relate to that.
Nevertheless, Bing has adopted the feature as an extension of its deep link inclusion on search results, but in any case, this is perhaps one of the most interesting things Bing has done with its results in a while.
“Depending on how people search, our algorithms now determine top actions and corresponding links in the site for a given category with high precision,” says Vijaywargi. “For instance, with airlines the top 3 tasks are: check-in to a flight, check the status of a flight or book a flight. For software sites, if you are searching for a specific product you likely want to download it. For car rental agencies, you would like to rent a car, find out locations or contact them.”
Another interesting thing about the feature is that it goes along with the market trend to treat websites not as static elements that are simply there to point users to, but are instead functional entities on their own, and that search engines should interface with them more deeply. Besides, Bing has always portrayed itself as wanting to get you the answers and get things done as quickly as possible, and this should, in theory at least, help with that.