Just a few weeks after Bing introduced the timeline feature for Olympic athletes, Bing has now expanded that to include other famous and/or influential people.
From Prince to Vincent van Gogh, Bing now presents a sidebar timeline of important events in the life of the person you’ve searched for.
Bing shows some standard items like height, spouse, children, parents, and birth and/or death dates.
Other information you may see includes education, group memberships, affiliations, published works, and songs. If the person has publicly shared social networking information, you’ll find links to Twitter, Facebook, and Klout scores. Like previous snapshot information, related people and other associated search info also appears.
But the largest change is the addition of the Timeline data. This includes footnotes of important events in that person’s life, along with the associated year the item occurred.
Bing notes that in some cases where “you would be more interested in another type of information” about a person, Timeline information won’t appear. This is intentional to save space and reduce page load times.
This is most true in the case of actors and singers. A search for [Prince], for example, will show information about songs, albums and romantic interests instead of timeline information.
Timeline data has been steadily rolling out over the past few weeks. If you haven’t seen it yet, keep searching for other names. Bing’s algorithm has generated timelines for “about half a million” famous people and they will continue to add to their ever-growing list.
The bigger question becomes will this eventually roll out to all people? With the relationship Bing has with Klout and other social networks, will more information be fed into the already-existing Klout-verified snapshots users already have access to? Do you want to be famous? Well do you, punk?