Bing Enhances Auto Instant Answers with Car Listings

One of Bing’s differentiating strategies is to offer increasingly rich information on the first page of search results: “instant answers.” (Of course Google and Yahoo try to do similar things.) In the context of autos, for example, Bing provides a great deal of information about fuel economy, pricing and links to other information on vehicles in the instant answer box.

Here’s the instant answer for the query “Nissan Cube“:

To this information Bing is now adding new and used car listings. Those listings will be a click away in a self-contained autos-shopping page that keeps users within the Bing experience. The listings pages feature filters that allow refinement of search results by multiple criteria. Users can then go to the individual listings and even send inquiries directly to dealers, all from within Bing.

I was unable to duplicate the experience and didn’t find these features and capabilities live but an entertaining video from Microsoft’s Stefan Weitz provides a demo and good sense of how it will work when it rolls out.