A few days ago, Bing rolled out its redesigned social sidebar for the desktop and the company just announced that it is now also bringing this new design to its search results pages on the iPad. The new social sidebar – one of the marquee features of Microsoft’s search engine – now makes social search results from Facebook, Twitter, Klout and Foursquare on Bing significantly easier to read.
As is typical for these kinds of large rollouts from Microsoft, it will likely take a few days before all users gets access to the new design.
Bing’s sidebar shows users posts from social networks and links to experts on sites like Quora that are related to the search query. With the new redesign, the sidebar now puts a stronger emphasis on showing images and the text of these social status updates. The new design also makes the social sidebar more of an integral part of the whole Bing experience instead of setting it aside in a gray box on the right of the screen.
According to the latest numbers from comScore, Microsoft currently holds 16.2% of the U.S. search engine market (excluding results on Yahoo). Even though Bing is one of the search engine options on iOS, the vast majority of Apple users never switched away from the default (and neither do most Android users). On mobile, Google currently owns around 95% of the search market in the U.S., so Bing still has a long way to go before it can challenge Google on mobile.