New Bing Spotlight helps you learn more about the news in less time

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Being an informed consumer of the news is more challenging today than it used to be. We live in a busy world where dozens of headlines compete for our attention every day. On top of that, it’s difficult to know if you’re getting all sides of a story or just leaning into an echo chamber, and it can feel like a full-time job to seek out various points of view.

At Bing, we want to empower users to get an overview of the news in less time. That’s why we built the Bing spotlight that provides overviews of news topics that you can see right in the Bing search results when you search for major developing news stories.

Spotlight shows users the latest headlines, a rundown of how the story has developed over time, and relevant social media posts from people around the web. Spotlight also shows diverse perspectives on a given topic so users can quickly get a well-rounded view on the topic before deciding what they want to go deeper on and read by clicking on any of the articles.

Spotlight is currently available on Bing desktop and mobile web in the US.

Users’ trust in the news we present is of the utmost importance to Bing, and we’re committed to providing a well-rounded view of news from diverse, quality sources.

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. We look 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, we show different viewpoints from high-quality sources. For a source to be considered high quality, it must meet the Bing News PubHub Guidelines, which is a set of criteria that favors originality, readability, newsworthiness, and transparency. Top caliber news providers identify sources and authors, give attribution and demonstrate sound journalistic practices such as accurate labeling of opinion and commentary. Behind the scenes, we leverage our 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. Our goal is to provide broader context for impactful stories, from politics to business to major disasters, and much more.

To try the new experience, search for major news topics like self-driving cars on Bing.com, or find the latest spotlights on the Bing.com homepage carousel.

Providing different perspectives in our spotlight experience is part of a broader effort to help our users be more informed with various perspectives on a range of topics, from news to common health questions. We’re working hard to expand the range of topics covered by this approach, including expanding the numbers of topics spotlight covers, to help you become more informed in less time and effort. We hope you’re as excited about these updates as we are!

Source: Bing helps you learn more about the news in less time | Bing Search Blog