Microsoft Builds Financial Data into Bing

Posted 01/28/2010 at 2:34pm | by Bart Salisbury

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There’s a ton of money to be made with a search engine these days. The seriousness of the market, which is starting to show signs of new competition, is underscored by the recent spate of feature enhancements. Yesterday, it was Google adding social networking hooks. Today, it is Microsoft adding financial data to Bing.

The Bing team has decided that one thing that will help to simplify our day, other than a recipe for chicken marengo, is investment data. In particular, reports for U.S. stocks and funds. According to the Bing Community Blog, all you need do is “enter a ticker in the search box e.g MSFT. Note our "Instant Answer" on top which provides basic data about the firm. If you click on the "Investor Data" tab on the left you go into our finance page.”

And, sure enough, checking out a few company ticker symbols, Bing dutifully reports stock results at/near the top of the search results. (It will appear under sponsored sites, if there are any.)

This addition to Bing already exists on Yahoo!, and, albeit a bit hit-and-miss, on Google. While this will make life “easier” for Bing users, whether it is enough to differentiate Bing from the search engine crowd and attract new users is an open question.

Image Credit: Microsoft