The Powerset team at Bing is working hard to make the Reference vertical the premier source on the web for your reference needs. We've got many new features under development, and a few that we've just launched to give you a taste for what's to come. Until now, the only way to reach Bing Reference has been via the instant answers available at bing.com - for example, for "Albert Einstein" or "Paul Celan". We've greatly expanded the set of queries on which this answer will trigger, and we've also enabled these answers for all English-speaking markets. But to really make the Reference vertical easier to find, we created the Reference homepage, at http://www.bing.com/reference. (Or, from the Bing homepage, click “more,” then click “Reference".)
The Powerset team at Bing is working hard to make the Reference vertical the premier source on the web for your reference needs. We've got many new features under development, and a few that we've just launched to give you a taste for what's to come.
Until now, the only way to reach Bing Reference has been via the instant answers available at bing.com - for example, for "Albert Einstein" or "Paul Celan". We've greatly expanded the set of queries on which this answer will trigger, and we've also enabled these answers for all English-speaking markets.
But to really make the Reference vertical easier to find, we created the Reference homepage, at http://www.bing.com/reference. (Or, from the Bing homepage, click “more,” then click “Reference".)
This page provides an overview of the topics and content available within Bing Reference. On this page you can research the Bing homepage image, browse topics of the day, and see examples of queries that illustrate Powerset's strong natural-language search capabilities.
The Reference vertical still searches all of Wikipedia for each query, but now for certain queries, also provides a dossier from Freebase to help surface the most relevant results. For example try the query "Australian animals."
You'll also notice a major change in the layout of the results page: the grid view helps you browse useful results that would otherwise land below the fold. (Or, feel free to go old school and switch back to the traditional list view...)
The Freebase result also provides a simple means for choosing between alternate interpretations of the query; for example, try searching for "Springfield"or “George Washington.” For information on George Washington the inventor (as opposed to the president), simply click the “inventor” tab.
On the Reference topic pages, we’ve added a highlighting feature, which allows you to easily showcase certain passages before sharing the page with others. The highlighting feature has been a favorite feature with users on powerset.com and we are very pleased that it is now available in Bing Reference. Simply click on the "highlighter" icon below the article outline, click on the sentence(s) you want to showcase, click "highlighter" again and copy the new URL. When you share this URL, your modified page will automatically scroll to the highlighted section. It’s a great tool for sharing notes with a friend, calling out a specific sentence in your blog, or proving someone wrong in an argument.
We're excited about the changes we've lanched so far, and even more excited about what's to come. Stay tuned to the Powerset blog to hear about the latest and greatest from the Powerset team at Bing.
Tom Bogart, Senior Program Manager, Powerset division of Bing
Have you ever wanted to delve deeper into the Bing homepage, and learn even more about the daily image
Some remarks I would like to make:
(I made a Query on Belgium, to test the changes)
* Double-click (with a pause between clicks) on the Belgium tab from FreeBase facts will cause a <hr> to be shown. It shouldn't.
* When you've the "(x hidden)" text, you should be able to click on it to display the hidden elements (same as the 'more' button).
* You should use more colours to help distinguish the elements and allow us to expand/shrink each block of the page using [v] and [^] buttons. Currently, we have three different expand behaviors : a 'more' link for FreeBase facts, a 'Next' button for Wiki results and a 'more' button for the Wiki Factz (I persist to say you should call that Facts or FactZ(tm), but that Factz is like you made a typo mistake). A common behavior would be good.
* Factz from Wikipedia should be in orange, as Facts from FreeBase.
* There's no link to open FreeBase' page on the subject we searched. FreeBase provides a lot more of informations for Paris than just population and adjoins. It would also be great to have a list to select which type of informations we would like to have on, say, 'Paris'. Paris can be a 'Location', an 'Olympics' city, a 'Litterature subject', ... Each prototype of object have its own particular set of properties, so it make sense to be able to change the prototype used to analyse the subject if multiple prototype can apply.
Keep your great work!
François
PS: Sorry for the prose, I generated the comments in 10' only, so I maybe missed some things we could perform but that were less evident. If it's the case, let me know!