Bing appears to be either testing or rolling out a new feature for news sites in its search results. The feature brings up a few of the most recent posts from a news source, when that source itself is the query.
I say this is either a test or a gradual roll out, because it is not happening in my own searches. TechCrunch has a piece about the feature (and a screenshot), which shows it, so evidently some people have it.
If you search for “TechCrunch,” or the “New York Times,” or presumably “Murdok” or any other news source, you would get three listings (under the regular snippet/deep links) that display how old they are. The feature is much like Bing’s current display for celebrity/a-list twitterer searches.
As TC’s Erick Schonfeld notes, “It’s part of Bing’s obsession with providing realtime results.” This obsession should be amplified soon (with Google also) as the results from the deals with Facebook and Twitter begin to surface.
The new news source feature is only a minor feature of Bing search because if it only displays for queries for that particular publication, chances are that users are just going to click through to the publication itself, where they will see the top headlines anyway. Judging from the similar feature Bing has in place for Tweets, they are often not the latest ones anyway (granted, Tweets can roll out a lot quicker than articles).
Still, the feature will give publications that much more real estate within search results, though the value of that real estate is debatable, considering the user is already searching for the publication.
Are you seeing this new Bing feature yet? Let us know.
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