Microsoft has been heavily adding social features and enhancements to its search engine, Bing. The company has taken large-scale efforts to improve the relevance of the search results as well as the marketing of the engine, to which end it recently launched a marketing campaign. Now, the Bing team has announced that it will be displaying content from selected authors on the social sidebar.
In doing so, Bing is closely following in the footsteps of Google which launched a similar venture called ‘Google Authorship’ during 2011. The feature allowed Google+ users to submit links of their writings if they wanted to participate in the program.
However, Bing isn’t offering any submissions yet. Apparently, the Bing team will be handpicking the authors which will be featured on the sidebar, with no procedure yet announced as to how an author himself can apply to the program.
The results from these ‘News Authors’ will appear on the social sidebar of Bing, mixed with the results from ‘People Who Know.’ The content from these authors will be sorted according to your search queries and the relevant authors will appear on the sidebar.
Once you hover over the name of a related author, it would open a small window showing the latest articles from him which are related to your search query as well as information about his public profiles.
For now, the Bing Team is actively sorting the authors that would be a part of the program and is constantly updating the list. Currently, there are some 45,000 people in the list already, which should be enough to kick-start the new feature into action.
Source: Bing
Courtesy: Search Engine Land
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