Helping you get things done faster is a big focus for us at Bing.
Whether it’s checking the status of your flight, accessing your online banking account or booking a room at a hotel, we are constantly exploring ways to help you make faster decisions. One way we do this is with “deep links”. Historically, we have used “deep links” as a way to surface popular pages within a given site. For instance, the result for United Airlines includes the links “Check in online,” “Baggage,” and “Flight Search” at the top of the page so you can quickly narrow down what you’re looking for and go directly to that part of the site.
Today we are taking this a step further with the release of Action Buttons. Now when you search across 7 popular categories - including airlines, couriers (e.g. FedEx), restaurants, banks, rental cars, software downloads and hotels - you will be presented with buttons for top actions on the site, that directly take you to the page where you can complete your task.
Based on how people search, our algorithms now determine top actions and corresponding links in the site for a given category with high precision. For instance, with airlines the top 3 tasks are: check-in to a flight, check the status of a flight or book a flight. For software sites, if you are searching for a specific product you likely want to download it. For car rental agencies, you’d like to rent a car, find out locations or contact them.
With Action Buttons, it’s less about searching and more about getting things done. With one click of a button, you can get to what you’re looking for right from your search results.
Stay tuned for more from us in this area. In the meantime, let us know what you think.
- Deepak Vijaywargi, Program Manager, Bing.
This is brilliant. It's not working perfectly - hotels just has a stupid "Locations" button, Bank is just "Login". I can't find a software company or restaurant that has buttons.
PS, what a pain in the butt it is to figure out how to leave a comment on this blog!
Is it possible for webmasters to identify with a tag which 3 buttons are the most important action buttons on the site?
Otherwise it could be possible that bing will display action buttons that are not very important.
@Virtuallawrence Thanks for the feedback on the "comments." I will put something in place this week to make it easier to comment.
@ NJC We use a combination of algorithms for site categorization, site structure determination and click log analysis to determine the top actions for each of the sites. And we will be constantly looking at new ‘verbs’ or actions we can add – stay tuned.
Interesting improvements. I can't tell to what extent this will be helpful to me yet, until I am seriously doing a research and want to save as much time as possible.
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