Bing is upgrading its search results with a new feature called “spotlight” for news topics. Spotlight aims to offer Bing users a comprehensive overview of a news story quickly.
This is achieved by grouping various elements of a developing news story at the top of the search results when a topic is searched for. A Bing spotlight includes:
– A carousel featuring the latest headlines
– Diverse perspectives offering different viewpoints on contentious topics
– A timeline showing how the story has evolved
– Relevant social media posts from across the internet
Bing explains how it delivers such in-depth news coverage:
“To start, Bing monitors millions of queries and news articles daily, identifying impactful stories that unfold over weeks or months. We consider various user signals like queries and browser logs, and document signals from publishers, such as the number of publishers covering a story, their angles, and how prominently they feature the story on their site.”
A set of criteria known as the Bing News PubHub guidelines outlines what qualifies as a high-quality source.
In summary, it relies on a mix of originality, readability, newsworthiness, and transparency.
Bing further elaborates on the technical aspects of how it indexes news stories:
“Behind the scenes, we utilize our deep learning algorithms and web graphs of hundreds of millions of sites in the Bing index to identify top sources for national news by category, query, or article. Our goal is to provide broader context for significant stories, from politics to business to major disasters, and much more.”
Spotlight is currently available on Bing desktop and mobile web in the US. It appears in the main search results, as well as in the homepage carousel.
