Bing is drawing more attention to news stories in the search results my including much larger image thumbnails with some news stories.

Here is an example:

The larger thumbnail is 195 x 195 pixels while the original thumbnail size is 80 x 80.

The news stories don’t seem restricted to a particular news sites, as I saw them on many different ones.  But they definitely do draw the eye over anything else on the page they appear on.

Here is another example:

The news stories with the larger thumbnails also get a significantly larger snippet from the news story also displayed.

It does seem that more popular or significant news stories tend to trigger the larger thumbnails, as they are not displayed for all searches that show news stories on the first page of the search results.  For example, here is a search for Obama showing today:

But by comparison, the search for “Trump” today shows no larger thumbnails at all.

Many searches on Bing also show no thumbnails at all in their search results, so there definitely seems to be a link to the importance or popularity of a story.  Bing began showing larger news thumbnails last week.