The Bing team posted on their blog today announcing a new feature update for Bing Travel – the addition of natural language search. When you type in a query such as “Flights from Boston to Los Angeles in June”, Bing will automatically fill in the flight search forms with the parameters you need. You no longer have to manually select your airport, destination, dates or other options to conduct a flight search. Here’s a screenshot of what you’ll get when you enter the query example before:
You can use a number of different combinations in your natural language query including airline names, number of stops or time of year, and Bing will do the job for you.
Next up we have Bing Images also receiving an update. Thanks to a tip from Pradeep, some lucky users noticed that Bing Images have been updated and given the “Visual Search”-style treatment. Take a look at the video below to see what we mean:
What we’re not sure is whether this new interface is Silverlight-based or entirely written in HTML5. Remember that Bing showed off their new HTML5 user interface back in September and one of the demo was that Visual Search does not require Silverlight anymore. We expect that the Bing team will be announcing something big really soon. Stay tuned at LiveSide for more information!