Bing adds Twitter, Foursquare and tabs

New features for the search engine

25 March 2010 14:36 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Microsoft's Bing search engine has announced in a blog post that it's testing a bunch of new features that'll soon be rolling out to full-time use. There's new Quick Tabs, and better integration with Foursquare and Twitter.

Bing's Quick Tabs try and work out what you're searching for when you type things in and provide shortcuts to useful parts of the search engine, like maps, weather or events. These were previously located on the left side, but are being relocated to the top of the page to make them more prominent.

The Twitter integration's being improved too. Instead of just offering links to relevant real-time results, the search engine will now offer the most popular links shared on Twitter from the website that you're searching for. So if you search for the Daily Mail, you'll get the most-tweeted Daily Mail stories offered to you.

Lastly, Bing's map app is getting real-time live data from Foursquare into its Silverlight-based maps. That'll let me people see what's going on near the places they're searching for, as well as see who's the mayor of certain locations. Bing says: "It's like an interactive day planner, designed to help find the best things to do in that area".

All these features will begin rollout "as we move into the Spring", the company says.

Via: bing.com

Full tags

Software, Websites, Bing, Search engines, Twitter, Foursquare