Microsoft’s Bing today launched a major update to its video search experience that gives the service’s video search results pages a complete overhaul. The update, which Microsoft says was “designed from the ground up,” introduces a new lightbox-style video overlay with a list of related searches on the right and a carousel with related videos on the bottom.
Bing now also features high-resolution pop-out video previews that are significantly larger than before and also offer more information about the video. For YouTube videos, for example, this means you can immediately see how many views a video had and a short description of the video with your search terms bolded. The previews now also feature audio controls and the favicon of the site they are coming from.
With this update, Bing also introduces a new set of filters that allow you to just view videos with 720p or 1080p resolutions, for example. You can also use this tool to filter your favorite Disrupt videos by date, length and source.
Bing’s video search has long been a standout feature of Microsoft’s search engine, and it can easily compete with Google’s video search, especially given that its feature set is now actually a step ahead of Google’s.
In the past, Bing’s video search caught some flak for making porn searches a bit too easy. Since then, Bing has gotten better at using its safe search feature to completely remove or pixelate adult content (depending on your setting) on the service. Still, with its new high-res previews, channels and related searches, Bing can now easily compete with the best of the tube site aggregators. It’s not something the company is likely to advertise, of course, but Bing isn’t exactly shying away from this “use case,” either.
