Search engine Bing shines Spotlight on breaking news stories

News junkies might want to consider taking the odd break from the Google search engine and popping over to Bing once in a while now that it has a new Spotlight feature. Spotlight is for those looking to catch up on developing news stories while ensuring that they are reading an overview of trusted and verified news sources.

"We look at various user signals such as queries and browser logs, and document signals from publishers such as how many publishers cover a story, their angles, and how prominently they feature the story on their site," Microsoft explained on the official Bing blog.

Using their Bing News PubHub guidelines, Spotlight will be populated with high-quality news stories that meets certain criteria including newsworthiness, transparency, readability and originality while clearly identifying sources and authors.

Another promising feature is the Perspectives module on the search results page. This will take articles clearly labelled as opinion and commentary and separate them from straight news. So users searching for self-driving cars, for example, will see the latest developments in Spotlight while pieces querying, say, the ethical implications of self-driving cars will end up within Perspectives.

[ blogs.bing.com/search/2018-08/Bing-helps-you-learn-more-about-the-news-in-less-time ]