Remember the flurry of new features Bing rolled out last week? Bing announced Wolfram Alpha results for nutrition searches, more in-depth weather results, enhanced hover previews, better maps, and turned MSN Video into Bing Videos. Well, it turns out it is also quietly launched another feature which highlights the latest posts from news sites.
If you do a search for “TechCrunch” or “New York Times,” for instance, underneath the summary information and deep links there are the three latest headlines under “Latest posts.”
This format is similar to when you search for certain widely-followed Twitter users and you get their latest Tweets. It’s part of Bing’s obsession with providing realtime results. Just as the recent broader integration of Twitter into search results brings the latest conversations into search, showing the latest headlines for news sites shows readers what’s breaking on the site without having to click through. Funny that it doesn’t work for the “Associated Press.”
Just to be clear, this is different than searching for a topic which is in the news and getting news results at the top in the form of headlines, which all search engines do. The “Latest posts” appear when you do a search for a specific news site. You’d think it would work for any blog with a feed, but it doesn’t seem to come up for many smaller blogs I tried.