Microsoft Announces Bing Knowledge Widget & App Linking For Publishers And Developers

Bing just released a new app-linking feature that allows you to link your Windows and Windows Phone apps to web search results.  By surfacing app links alongside web search results, app linking helps boost discoverability and engagement of your apps.  If you’re a travel provider, for example, and on-board your Windows Phone app to the Bing app-linking feature, anyone who looks up “paris hotels” on Windows Phone would also see your app link alongside relevant search results for your website. With one click, users can then deep link to the content about Paris hotels in your app or, if the app isn’t installed on the device, users can easily install it. Over a dozen apps have already on-boarded, including Hulu, Foursquare, and TripAdvisor. Look up “Modern Family” in Windows 8.1 Smart Search and, with one click, you can deep link into the Hulu app and start watching the show.

App Linking will be available for businesses. Bing Webmaster Tools will be the interface to linking a website to your app. Bing App Linking lets you connect your app to your web site so that search results for the top level of your web site include a link to your app. If you implement deep linking, search results for pages within your web site will include deep links to targets inside your app.

Webmasters will now be able to add information to Bing’s knowledge repository. The Bing Knowledge Widget is now available for webmasters and publishers. The JavaScript-based widget for webmasters that detects and visualizes entities on the webpage and displays rich information about the entity.  A visitor to your site need simply hover over the objects you’ve selected in the backend to see the widget come to life along the right-hand side of the screen, showcasing content related to each entity, directly from Bing’s knowledge repository.

The Bing Knowledge Widget can be configured with three pre-defined options:

• Entity Images: when you select this option entities that are detected will appear only as images in a vertical carousel alongside the page.
• Entity Images & Links: when you select this option entities that are detected will appear both as images in a vertical carousel alongside the page as well as links within the text of the page. This is the most popular option.
• Entity Links: when you select this option, entities that are detected will appear as links within the text of the page.

Source: Bing