Back in March we launched a new site called Bing Listens. The site gives our customers a direct line of communication to the team developing Bing features.
Bing Listens is a place to contribute your thoughts on how to make Bing better, vote on the ideas you like best, and share the cool and unique ways you use Bing. Our team actively reviews the ideas and responds to them every day.
In the first few months alone, we’ve seen more than a thousand ideas ranging from new ways to earnrewards to adding a custom filter for news, to enabling users to contribute feedback on translation results, and even searching medical related issues.
More than 1 million visitors have been to Bing Listens, with thousands contributing, voting or commenting on the 1500-plus ideas that have been submitted since the launch. The suggestions have been fantastic. We have responded to more than 80 percent of the user-submitted ideas so far, and as a result of your feedback, we have already implemented many feature requests, including:
- Up-to-date public transit data (feature details in this blog)
- ‘My Places’ on Bing Maps now syncs with Cortana (feature details in this blog)
- Unit setting added to weather
- Shopping functionality added to Bing images (feature details in this blog)
- Notification of Bing Rewards offer expiration
We’re also working to make it easier for you to track the progress of ideas you’ve submitted. On the Bing Listens homepage, we show the top three ideas that have been addressed and top three that we are working on based on the number of votes. You can view the rest of the ideas in each category by choosing “See more.”
In addition to all the great suggestions, we are learning that sometimes even our most frequent users are not familiar with all of Bing’s features and functionality. We’re working on making our features easier to discover, but in the meantime, here are a few examples of requested features that Bing already supports that you can check out today:
- See only Popular Now searches, not recent searches
- Open links from search results in a new browser window
- Use quotation marks to search specific phrases
Finally, we know that people use Bing in very diverse and interesting ways. You can tell us how you use Bing by clicking on the “I use Bing to…” button. We’ve had several hundred entries to date — a couple of great examples include:
“I enjoy the pictures and look forward every morning to something new. I cannot go to these places and cannot travel so this is my window to the world a chance to see and learn new things I never known. I thank you Bing for giving me a window to see new things.”
“I haven’t used Google in over a year. Why? Because I love to Bing things. Bing Rewards is amazing. Being able to get Xbox Music passes? Count me in!! Bing also has a Video Preview for when you search videos and/or web searches. This search engine is far better than its rival, Google.”
Bing Listens is just one of the many ways we connect with our users, and we have plans to do more. Keep the feedback coming!
– The Bing Team