Microsoft’s Bing just announced that it is adding a section for news authors to its social sidebar. “Much of the information we consume and search for relates to current events,” says the Bing Team, “and the most recent and accurate information often comes from news articles.” Starting today, Bing will highlight these authors in the “People Who Know” section of the sidebar.
Whenever you hover over one of these authors’ names, you will see their top articles related to your search query, as well as a link to their Twitter page. The sidebar also allows Bing users to see all of a writer’s articles by clicking on the aptly named “See all articles” link.
According to Bing, the team is “just beginning to surface the countless number of authors out there to build this feature” and will continue to add new authors and author pages over time.
Google, of course, has long been offering a similar feature and currently highlights author information right on its search results pages and on Google News. These results also include a link to the writer’s Google+ profile and a link to a list of all of the author’s articles. Google is officially still piloting this program, but it’s pretty easy for authors to add their names to the list. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to be more interested in manually curating a list of “experts in their field.”