You probably haven’t seen the news, but there’s a U.S. presidential election coming up, and Microsoft has launched a new Bing interactive experience to help voters learn more and make educated decisions.
“With only three weeks until the American people vote for the next president of the United States, some may still have unanswered questions or be undecided on who to vote for,” a Microsoft representative told me. “Today, Microsoft’s Bing is debuting a few new features as part of its elections experience, providing voters the opportunity to stay on top of the latest developments and predictions, and serving as a wealth of info leading up to election day.”
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You can find Bing’s election experience by—wait for it—searching for Election 2016. What you see is a special interface that is now tailored for where we are in the U.S. presidential race.
What’s new today is the Campaign Landscape view, which Microsoft tells me provides voters with a lot of information specific to this election.
Features here include:
Election predictions. The main Polls view shows which candidate Bing predicts will win the election overall, and which will win each state. All predictions are updated in real time, and Microsoft will soon add forecasts for each congressional race, plus a prediction for which party will control the balance of power in Congress after the election.
Candidate spending. The Spending tab provides a map showing how much money each candidate is spending by state and how much each candidate has raised from different sources, industries and Super PACs on the national level.
Voting preferences by demographic. Here, you can see search volume by each candidate in relation to age and gender, on a per-state basis.
News headlines. The Campaign Landscape view automatically serves up news items related to the election.
Final presidential debate live stream. And if you just hate yourself, you can watch the third and final presidential debate live, right here in Bing: Just search for “presidential debate” tomorrow on Bing.com and Microsoft will direct you to a live stream of the debate.
Suffice to say that politics makes our industry-specific platform wars look civil by comparison, so let’s keep the nonsense to a minimum in the comments, please. We get it: You have strong opinions about this election. We all do.