Bing has announced an array of new “intelligent search” features around hotel searches, home cost and pricing guides and also coupon and deal snippets in search. Bing said it hopes these features let searchers save money and make better decisions when booking a hotel, hiring a contractor for their home or finding good deals online.
Hotel booking
When you are looking for a hotel to stay at, Bing can now give you options to search for a specific hotel by date and see the prices across several booking sites. They even show you photos of the hotel, the class and other booking tips for that hotel. Bing said it “display[s] booking tips when you’re looking at hotels for which there are competing options you may not have considered.”
Bing also shows you historical price trends for the date range you’re exploring in this grid:
Plus Bing has this massive comparison view that provides a comprehensive overview of pricing by hotel option. It shows hotels in a grid with their price, ratings, class level, amenities and more.
Home cost repairs & job features
What if you needed to fix something in your home? Build a fence around the property to keep out those pesky neighbor kids? Paint a bedroom or fix a broken leaky faucet? Bing can help you with that too! Bing said they can show you “cost ranges to provide transparency for home services like sink installation costs and toilet repairs.” They get the data from Porch, a home service provider portal.
This is what the search results look like:
Then, after you find out how much it should cost, Bing will let you find local businesses using Yelp to request a quote from several of those vendors.
Coupons and deals
Finally, Bing also added a new snippet feature to show you deals on a site. Bing said, “We now aggregate deals across first- and third-party listings, then display them when you search for retailers or coupons. We surface relevant insights like ‘expiring soon,’ whether the offers are online or in-store only, and more.”
It is unclear if you need schema on your site to showcase these new deal/coupon snippets. Here is what they look like in Bing:
About The Author
Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.