Microsoft Superpowers Bing’s News Feature With New Spotlight Experience

Microsoft is releasing a new feature for Bing in the United States. The company is giving Bing’s News experience a huge upgrade with a new Spotlight feature.

Bing Spotlight is a new feature that will help users get all the latest news and updates about all the major news. The feature uses artificial intelligence, as well as other relevant data to build a richer picture of the news for readers. The experience will present users with the latest headlines, as well as different perspectives of the story, relevant updates from social media, and a rundown of all the events surrounding the topic and how it developed over time.

All of this is intelligently generated by Bing, building on the search engine’s existing intelligent search capabilities. Microsoft is using a ton of data here to ensure it’s delivering accurate updates from trusted sources in the web within the Spotlight experience. “To start, Bing monitors millions of queries and news articles every day and identifies impactful stories that evolve over a period of weeks or months. We look at various user signals such as queries and browser logs, and document signals from publishers such as how many publishers cover a story, their angles, and how prominently they feature the story on their site.  For controversial topics, in the Perspectives module, we show different viewpoints from high-quality sources,” the company said.

Bing Spotlight sounds a lot like some of the new features found in Google News, though. Google recently upgraded its News service which includes similar features like the rundown of all the different events for a news event, etc. Bing is certainly playing catch-up here, though the Spotlight experience will definitely make Bing users’ experience a lot better when it comes to major news events. That’s only if you live in the United States, of course.