Take shortcuts to your favourite info with the new Bing Bar

I’ve just discovered and downloaded the new Bing Bar. I now get single-click access to my Facebook feeds, local traffic & weather, news, maps and translation (thinking about children’s French/German/Spanish homework). You can download it now from here.

I’ve taken the below copy from the Bing Community Blog, which was posted on 17 February, and suggest you take a look there for full info and graphics. This is just the highlights.

 

Great search

· The first thing you will notice is that the search box is centered, not on the left. As we talked to consumers they overwhelmingly wanted search to be front and center, particularly as they looked at the clean design of Internet Explorer 9.

· Similarly, people want to reduce the number of clicks to find what they want so we consolidated things like search history (in purple), suggestions (in black) and deep links (at the top) right into the search box to help accelerate search.

Facebook

People told us that they spend a huge amount of time on Facebook these days, and we are building on our relationship with Facebook to bring a great web experience to our joint customers. We use the notification capabilities to let you know that you have new activity on your Facebook account, so you can stay connected no matter what you’re doing on the web.

 

· News Feed – You have quick access to your news feed to see posts from your friends and to update your status. You can also comment on or Like a friend’s post right from the Bing Bar.

· Photos - With photos you get a great looking collage of your friend's photos, making it easy to scan the pictures your friends are sharing.

 

Proactive Alerts

We created Alerts to act a bit like your online personal assistant, letting you know when new messages arrive or when the Bing Bar can help you with something you are doing online.

 

Mail

We know it’s common for people to use more than one email account, and many times from different providers (we support Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail). We wanted to help simplify and provide one central location for consumers to quickly preview mail.

Try the new Bing Bar for yourself - it really works well!