Microsoft"s Bing team has been adding a lot of new features to its search service. It seems every week there"s some kind of announcement concerning a new or improved addition for Bing users, like last week"s reveal that Bing is now the default search service for Apple"s Siri voice recognition feature.
However, the Bing team is working on a lot more than just what has been revealed to the public. In a blog post on Thursday, the company said it actually runs hundreds of experimental features on Bing every day, most of which are not talked about and are unseen by Bing"s users.
The team is making an exception to the Bing experiment rules this week, revealing a new feature it is calling Bing Boards. The blog states:
Bing Boards are visual collections of images, videos and links that tell a story from a unique point of view. They are created by people who are passionate about the topics they blog, write or talk about – not companies or algorithms. Bing Boards are designed to be complementary to web search results, appearing in the middle column of Bing, and are aimed to help people to discover new, visually rich content.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the look of Bing Boards is, on the surface at least, similar to the popular image collection website Pinterest. Microsoft says that for this experiment it is working with food and lifestyle bloggers, among others, to help evolve the feature. Pinterest became popular thanks to its large female user base and it"s not a shock to learn that on Microsoft"s official Bing Boards website, the first contributors to the boards, along with the Bing Boards team, are largely made up of women.
People who are interested in making their own Bing Boards can request an invite on its official website.
Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft