Bing, the popular search engine rival to Google has been adding an increasing amount of features recently in their attempt to one-up the the search engine giant. Well with these content aware features comes a range of nice handy features for gamers.
So a standard feature of Bing searches is the ‘Related Searches’. Kind of like ‘Google Suggest’, just not inline as you’re searching. This can offer up in a gaming context walkthroughs, achievement hints, information on glitches, wikias and in a few cases torrents.
When offering up sales it’ll give you its rating. It’s a shame this doesn’t pull up metacritic ratings for an ‘at a glance’ look. But I guess that would mean making searches much more context aware, this way lets them pull up ratings for all sales items.
For some games it will even offer up a brief summary of the game as seen above. Gears had one too but I thought I’d spice up this article with a variety of games to look at. The only problem with this feature is that’s it’s really awesome, and it should be at the top. But for some games it doesn’t appear at all and for most this information box is usually at the bottom of the page. Which loses much of it’s value as I don’t know about you but I tend to not scroll down that often in a search.
This is all combined with Bings usual range of Image and video searches. Which for those looking for a new gaming wallpaper should look into. There’s a handy ‘Wallpaper’ size button that will pull up all images with the same resolution as your current monitor. And it’s a streaming search, no pesky ‘next’ button like Google. Just scroll to your hearts delight.
In addition to all this Bings new Entertainment section, which has information on movies, TV shows and video games, also includes a few free to play and demo web games ready for you to jump in. These games allow you to sign in with a Facebook Connect login to compare your high scores with your friends. I gave it a whirl with the PvZ demo. It’s pretty snappy to load up, looks like trash (but so does the desktop version), but great little area to quickly pop into a few games to while away a couple of hours.
So are these new features enough to get you to give Bing a shot for your gaming search needs?
Article inspiration from Destructoid
