Bing Shopping Adds Search Refinements

Posted by David Weichel on August 15, 2011 in Strategy

Highlighting their emphasis on "speed" (where have I heard this before?), Bing announced faster search refinements, a new sale filter and better shopping list functionality early this morning.

Faster Search Refinements (and much more of them)

Suggested search is definitely nothing new to search engines, but Bing Shopping has implemented it in a way that is slightly different from what we're used to. Bing Shopping now displays a plethora of search suggestions in the drop-down list of the search bar that include not only keyword refinements, but category, brand, department and style refinements as well.

In the example above, I highlighted the search refinements for the query "shoes" and Bing Shopping came back with 35 possible refinements for me.  That's right, 35!  And that's not counting the 9 additional options I get when I place my cursor over the three results at the bottom.

Now, some of these refinements were previously available on Bing Shopping but they were located in the left navigation panel and it was unclear as to how effective these filters actually were.  (Click here to see what the old filters looked like).   Including these refinements within the drop-down of a user's initial search should increase the usage of these filters and help guide users' searches to their desired destination faster.

What this means for merchants

It's going to be imperative that merchants provide the most detailed and accurate product-level data in their product feeds for Bing Shopping.  Merchants often dismiss columns like "Material" in their product feeds since the value of sending this data wasn't immediately apparent to them.  But now that Bing is attempting to funnel shoppers using these search refinements it becomes increasingly important for merchants to include (and optimize) these  columns in order to increase quality visibility on this free shopping engines.