Microsoft has quietly rolled out a minor enhancement to its search autosuggest feature. In fact it is so quiet that you wouldn’t really notice it, in case you’re using Bing.com. But if you’re too observant you might notice that when you type in your query on Bing.com, the suggested search terms are now more timely and relevant to breaking news and hot trending topics.
According to a post on the Bing blog, approximately 45% of search queries conducted on Bing resulted in either a user conducting an immediate re-query, or abandoning the page altogether. So for a search engine, it is necessary to make users find the right information by providing relevant and accurate autosuggest based on the first few characters of the search query that the user has typed in. And one way of doing that which the Bing team thought of is to incorporate breaking news and hot trending topics to autosuggest. What’s cool about this feature is the fact that it updates every 15 minutes. So, the suggested search terms will vary and changes over time.
Here’s an example given, when users typed in “Gol” and Bing autosuggesting various search terms relevant to the Golden Globe Awards.
