Bing Boards: New Search Experiment Highlights 'Inspiring Content'

6:54 PM
Continuing to experiment with ways to change and improve the search experience, Bing has introduced a new experiment called Bing Boards. Resembling a sort of inline image slide show, you find it in the Bing Social Sidebar for certain searches.

Here, you can see the positioning of the Bing Boards area, located in the second column of the search results page between related searches and the side ads.

When you click the Bing Boards area, a modal window pops up atop of the results page. This one contains a link to the blog post that inspired the images in the Bing Board.

So what exactly are Bing Boards?

Quite simply, it's an experiment with putting Pinterest-like boutique content front-and-center in search results, or at least complementing them from a sidebar next to search results. From the official Bing Boards page, it's Bing's way of "trying something new ... to see what happens."

It's quite the interesting experiment. Since its inception, the Bing Social Sidebar was used to connect you with friends and other social network connections to see relevant things your network is sharing and talking about related to your search. Bing Boards are not (necessarily) being created by people you follow or are friends with.

However, this isn't part of the Social Sidebar. It actually replaces the Social Sidebar, presumably only for certain search queries.

Bing is working with a small group of featured contributors, mostly food and lifestyle bloggers who Microsoft considers passionate thought leaders in their respective lifestyle topics. Bing is careful to point out these are individual bloggers, not companies. They even provide a link if you want to signup to contribute to Bing Boards.
Continuing to experiment with ways to change and improve the search experience, Bing has introduced a new experiment called Bing Boards. Resembling a sort of inline image slide show, you find it in the Bing Social Sidebar for certain searches.

Here, you can see the positioning of the Bing Boards area, located in the second column of the search results page between related searches and the side ads.

When you click the Bing Boards area, a modal window pops up atop of the results page. This one contains a link to the blog post that inspired the images in the Bing Board.

So what exactly are Bing Boards?

Quite simply, it's an experiment with putting Pinterest-like boutique content front-and-center in search results, or at least complementing them from a sidebar next to search results. From the official Bing Boards page, it's Bing's way of "trying something new ... to see what happens."

It's quite the interesting experiment. Since its inception, the Bing Social Sidebar was used to connect you with friends and other social network connections to see relevant things your network is sharing and talking about related to your search. Bing Boards are not (necessarily) being created by people you follow or are friends with.

However, this isn't part of the Social Sidebar. It actually replaces the Social Sidebar, presumably only for certain search queries.

Bing is working with a small group of featured contributors, mostly food and lifestyle bloggers who Microsoft considers passionate thought leaders in their respective lifestyle topics. Bing is careful to point out these are individual bloggers, not companies. They even provide a link if you want to signup to contribute to Bing Boards.