Bing Adds Images & Ambiguity Thumbnails to Autosuggest

Bing has added thumbnails to their autosuggest dropdowns. They show for a variety of queries, but seem to show most often for the types of queries where Bing is fairly confident that it is likely the result the searcher is looking for.

Frank Sandtmann spotted it in the Bing search results and sent them to TheSEMPost.

I also noticed they have added thumbnails for ambiguity options – when you search for a keyword that could have two possible results.  Here is one variation:

This is quite different from Google’s own ambiguity boxes, which appear on the search results page rather than via autosuggest, although sometimes the autosuggests do lead to the different possibilities the searcher might be looking for.

Bing announced the first use of thumbnails in autosuggests in 2013.  Here is how it looked then:

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post

Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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