Microsoft has announced the launch of Bing Spotlight in the UK The feature was initially launched in the U.S. in August, but is now available across the pond too. With Spotlight, news headlines are shown front and centre on the Bing home page, better informing visitors of the site. Microsoft also uses the tool to provide better search results.
Corporate Vice President at Microsoft and Head of Bing, Jordi Ribas, discussed the new feature, saying:
“We can make sure that when we run a search, we find authoritative results. For a question such as ‘is coffee good for you?’, there are some authoritative results that cluster around a positive sentiment, and some that cluster around a negative sentiment. Our algorithm can identify that and provide a multi-perspective answer.”
Aside from putting news on the home page, when you do searches for controversial topics it will show you articles from different view points from “high-quality sources” to help you get an idea about what is being said about the topic you searched for.
Ribias said that Microsoft will continue delivering objective results with the feature and not personalise results based on what the firm thinks users want to see in order to generate revenue. He said that subjective content is “not good for search engines because it could lead to biases.”
If you’re in the UK and want to try out the feature, just head over to Bing and start conducting a few searches. You should see relevant news content near the top of the results.