Do you use Bing? If so, here’s a bit of good news for you: Microsoft revealed a new set of features designed to make it easier to find and enjoy music while using Bing search.
Now, when you search for a song or band using Bing, the most popular song will show up in the top left hand corner of the screen. The right hand side of the screen gets populated by lists of Related Artists and Related Albums. Click on a video and you’ll be taken to a window that plays your selection, while the right side of the window gets filled with related videos.
Here’s what’s really cool though. Instead of clicking on a video to check if that’s the song or version of the song you want to hear, all you have to do hear a preview of that video is put your mouse pointer over the song you’re curious about. In our experience, it only took about half a second for the preview clip to start playing once we began to hover our mouse over the song we were interested in listening to. We really appreciate this feature, especially considering how much time we’ve spent on YouTube, clicking on a song we wanted to listen to, only to find that it was a live version, remastered version, or, worst of all, someone random person’s cover of that tune.
Here’s what Ryan Becker and Deepak Santhanam, members of the Bing Multimedia Team, had to say about the changes.
“We believe that search should be more than a collection of blue links pointing to pages around the web. Search should be a reflection of the actual world including music,” he said. “To that end, Bing knows that artists create songs, songs are collected in albums and albums are part of musical genres.”
Whether people will switch to Bing just to take advantage of the new music search features is up for debate. Regardless, it’s good to see that Microsoft is supporting those who do use Redmond’s alternative to Google and Yahoo.
