Microsoft Bing’s new spotlight feature provides overviews of news topics

Microsoft today highlighted its latest feature on Bing which will help users in getting all sides of a news story easily. This new feature is called spotlight and it offers overviews of news topics that users can see right in the Bing search results when they search for major developing news stories. Take a look at the image above for example. Spotlight not only displays the latest headlines, it also provides a rundown of how the story has developed over time, and even shows related social media posts from people around the web. It offers diverse perspectives on a given topic so users can quickly get a balanced view.

Here’s how Bing spotlight work:

• To start, Bing monitors millions of queries and news articles every day and identifies impactful stories that evolve over a period of weeks or months.
• Bing looks at various user signals such as queries and browser logs, and document signals from publishers such as how many publishers cover a story, their angles, and how prominently they feature the story on their site.
• For controversial topics, in the Perspectives module, Bing shows different viewpoints from high-quality sources.
• Behind the scenes, Bing leverages deep learning algorithms and web graphs of hundreds of millions of web sites in the Bing index to identify top sources for national news, per category, query, or article.

Try out this new feature here.

Source: Bing