As Search Engine Watch first reported in August, Bing has been enhancing shopping results. Over the three months since, Bing has completely integrated shopping results directly into main the main experience. Now, as of yesterday, Bing has retired the notion of a “dedicated shopping” experience when you search for products.
The move, according to Bing’s announcement, “is to help you search less and do more.”
Search continues moves toward user intent, not just keywords. Bing has been using catch phrases such as “Bing and Decide” and “Bing is for doing” for quite some time now. By removing the shopping search option, Bing is taking that next step to try to understand your intent. Using Bing Snapshot technology, certain search queries will return snapshots of various products in the right side column.
Clicking on these products will produce a different result set of vendor sites that sell that particular product. Those results will also contain a carousel of similar products or models directly under the search box. Reviews, product specs are also included as snapshot information in the sidebar, as are prices from various vendors who purchase Bing ads.
While most people are no longer seeing Bing Shopping, the product experience is still rolling out for all users as Bing continues to improve the logic, and hopefully the number of queries for which product comparisons appear.