Bing: Now more personal and local

Bing, Microsoft’s popular search engine, has rolled out two new search features today that will yield more relevant results for its millions of users. The search engine will now tailor results by city for users in the US, and will also be taking users’ search history in hand to help improve future results.

To boost the relevance of its location-related results, Bing is now filtering results based on what city a users is searching from. You can manually change the city you are searching ‘from’ if you choose, so that no matter where you are you can search as if you were somewhere else.

Bing claims that 76% of people use search engines to plan trips, so the new ability to raise local results based on user location higher will help people save time in their planning process.

Secondly, the search engine has implemented “a feature that helps Bing present the most relevant website based on an individual’s previous searches.” That sounds scarier than it is. In effect, Bing is now realizing that if you search for something that has a variety of possible meanings, say MIX for example, the one you select the first time is probably the one that you will want the next time.

SearchEngineLand managed to find this in the wild just after it came out, and this is what Bing will tell you when it has adapted your results based on your search history:

Today is yet another chapter in the evolutionary improvement process of Bing that, depending on your opinion, either brings the search engine closer to being better than Google, or merely keeps it in place as it improves at the same rate as Google.

Whatever your perspective, Bing is putting in the time to become a great search property, because when you are going up against a product as refined as Google, good does not cut it.