Microsoft held a big event focussing on its decision engine yesterday and introduced a slew of changes that will come to the platform over the coming months.
First up is a whole new level of integration with Facebook. The software-giant believes that social networking is important to delivering better answers to people's questions, so the search engine will begin to annotate results with friends 'likes'. The idea is that this will help to guide people to the correct answer more quickly, and will start rolling out over the next few weeks.
Bing Maps is also getting a major upgrade, both on the desktop and for some mobile devices. Certain buildings, including shopping centres, airports and museums will begin to be mapped and public transport routes will also be added for select cities. Starting in select North American cities, Bing will also be able to plan your route based on transit timetables.
On the mobile side, iPhone users will be able to access real-time transit predictions that can tell you whether or not a bus or train is on time. Again, this is limited to only a few cities in the US for the time being, but more will be added over time.
StreetSide has also been introduced for select locations, which aims to help people to familiarise themselves with an area before they arrive. Although it's functionally similar to Google's Street View, Bing's implementation lets users 'slide' down a street smoothly, rather than having to keep tapping their way along a road. Zooming also automatically switches to a panoramic 360 degree view, making for a more intuitive experience.
It'll also be possible to check-in on Facebook, FourSquare and Windows Live, all from within the Bing app.
The Android app has also been updated, but less drastically than the iPhone version, and unfortunately, it doesn't look like Windows Phone 7 will be getting the new features any time soon.
Rounding out are the updates are an enhanced desktop image search and the addition of travel information and entertainment listings. This will include detailed flight information, 'destination pages' which will group results on a particular location, landing pages for films and TV programmes and enhanced TV listings.
Microsoft is introducing a huge number of updates, and although they'll be rolled out gradually - especially on these shores - we can expect a lot of changes to Bing over the coming months. Further details on all of the updates are available over at SearchEngineLand.
