Bing adds “Attractions”

Microsoft’s Bing continues to add features to its Travel vertical, this time announcing “Attractions” in a blog post on the Bing Search blog.  Attractions bring together a number of bits of information for some 52,000 attractions around the world, offering addresses, details, reviews, video, and images all in one page.

Attractions joins Events as a specific vertical under Destinations when searching on, say, a city like San Francisco or London, UK:

bing-attractions

Searching on attractions for a city offers up a list of selected attractions, for which you can then dive a bit deeper:

bing-attractions-parliament

The Bing blog post notes that “page content is contextual based on user location”, we found that finding the Attractions vertical was somewhat inconsistent: searching on a city sometimes resulted in the “Attractions” menu item in the top bar, and sometimes not, searching on “London Attractions” did not bring up the menu item, but “Seattle Attractions” did.  Since we were searching for the “Attractions” feature, and not Attractions themselves, this may not be such a big deal, but we’re not sure how to get a consistent experience, say if you were trying to choose between different travel destinations based on their attractions by searching in Bing.

The Attractions page features, as many of the Bing vertical pages do, filters on the left hand side to narrow down your searches, say to museums, or by neighborhood, etc.  Bing continues to expand the filtering features, as well, and one of our readers noted that “Narrow by Date” has recently been added as a filtering option for some searches.

As Stefan Weitz says in the video accompanying the blog post, Bing is continuing to “bring you structured information in a way that helps you make a decision”, as it continues to move beyond 10 blue links.

Our initial interaction with “Attractions” is that once discovered, it can indeed be helpful in quickly presenting some of the most relevant information on destination attractions.  Making it a bit more universal and discoverable we are sure will come with time and a few tweaks, but it’s well worth having in search results.

Comments

  • http://jigar-mehta.blogspot.com jigarme

    This is awesome for planning short trips.. One more reason to love Bing.. Great job guys! Keep it up..

  • Robin

    yeah, cool feature, when is bing uplaoding the new website using HTML5?

  • Anonymous

    Great!
    Now, everyone in the Bing team please spend a couple of hours playing with Bing maps. You’ll probably discover that there is actually a whole world beyond the US (uh-oh!), a world in which Bing is awful and lacks every nice feature released in the US.

    Then be ashamed.
    Thanks

  • Anonymous

    Not great when I search for an Attraction , e.g. World Museum Liverpool, it comes up with the info but the maps page won’t give me the location- instead I am given the cafe- what happened to the end-to-end experience? The World Museum website however has a lovely Google map… hmm.

    I use Bing everyday, I dislike Google’s attitude in the industry and therefore Bing is number one for me but I want better implementation than this.

    Good start, not great.

    • Anonymous

      I don’t know if it’s changed since you last saw it, but it does give you the link to the full Bing Maps view of the location. On the Attraction page, under the Details section, you can either click on the thumbnail of the map or click Directions.

      • Anonymous

        Which country are you accessing it from? On mine I can click the link and it takes me to Frommers.com’s page on the attraction… I can get a map from that but it’s provided by Google Maps!

        I’m a UK user, it’s a UK attraction and the functionality is there but it’s only half baked when I do it.

        Glad to see it’s working for you though.

  • Anonymous

    You wrote a post recently on Hotmail Calendar. Then you deleted it. Why?!

  • http://www.advancedwebads.com/sc/164 Mel Webads

    Well, this sounds great! I think this is very useful really. Thanks for sharing the news here. I will try this out now.

  • Anonymous

    Has no-one noticed the fact that LiveSide.net deleted a post recently about Hotmail Calendar? Why?