Microsoft is often derided for its lack of international support of its software and hardware offerings, and for good reason. Microsoft has made it a habit to initially seed its software and services to customers in North America and after that, it can become a bit of a crapshoot as to whether international markets see the same sort of investment.
Bing has been a prime example of Microsoft’s North America exclusivity practices. New features and services for Bing are popping up all the time for North America users while only select updates reach beyond the company’s western shores.
With that being said, the Bing team is making an effort to keep parity with its UK offerings by finally releasing Bing Spotlight this week (via Neowin). The Bing Spotlight feature allows users to see news headlines (mostly user-curated) at the bottom of the Bing homepage as well as access to an improved search algorithm based on authoritative results.
Corporate vice president and head of Bing, Jordi Ribas announced the release with a bit of detail about what UK users will be getting in their new Bing experience.
“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.”
In lieu of recent political news both in North America and the UK, the Bing team is making a concerted effort to give its users highly qualified information from various perspectives on searched topics, both positively reaffirming and negatively challenging.
The new Bing Spotlight feature is rolling out now in the UK. Users in the UK are encouraged to conduct a couple of searches to test out Bing Spotlight today.
