If you type a search query into the address bar of Internet Explorer 11, it searches Bing for you. However, this is not clear to some users who are not as tech-savvy. To make searching more obvious, Bing has added a search bar to the ‘new tab’ page as well. If this story sounds familiar, it’s because Google did the same thing with Chrome earlier. Firefox followed suit with a slightly more customizable search bar, and now Internet Explorer has jumped on the bandwagon also.
You still see as many ‘frequent’ tiles, so no functionality has been taken from you, even if the tiles are not smaller in size. However, if you were used to searching from the address bar, you may be feeling annoyed at the unnecessary changes.
But not to worry, Microsoft has not forgotten the Internet Explorer address bar, and has provided the following updates, if the address bar is your choice of search workflow:
- History and Favorites group headers are not displayed in the suggestions list of the address bar. This lets more suggestions display in the same vertical space.
- For certain queries, there may only be several web suggestions. However, for other more ambiguous queries, more web suggestions may have to be displayed to capture your intent. With this update, the search engine can control how many web suggestions are appropriate for the typed query so that you receive the appropriate number of relevant suggestions.
- Domain suggestions for sites that you never visited before are not displayed (for example, if you type “m” and you had never visited “mapquest.com”, it will not be displayed). These domain suggestions did not receive many clicks from you and yet you use valuable real estate. Instead, more relevant suggestions are displayed.
Note: It seems this update is only for Windows 8/8.1, and not available yet for Windows 7 or Windows 10 Preview users. In order to have this new feature, you must download today’s update for Internet Explorer. Head over to Windows Update to snag it.
Further reading: Bing, Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft
