In case you missed it, I gave myself a challenge and completely cut myself off from Google to focus on Bing on March 1st, 2011. So as of now, I have been Bing Only and Google Free for over 5 straight days. A small, but significant achievement for a search engine marketer. My goal here is simple: gain a deeper understanding of Bing. I figured that the best way to accomplish this was if I could commit, and stick to, only searching with Bing for a whole month. 5 days down and only 26 more to go.

Last week I spent my time getting to know more about Bing, working through Indexing issues and becoming familiar with Bing Webmaster Tools. This week I am planning on being more organized and will be examining some of their search engine tools and features.

Day 6: “Popular Now” Trending Search Features – Sunday, March 6th

For those of you that, like me, work online and still try an stay up with what the offline world is doing, you’ll like both of Bing’s Popular Now homepage features.

These are similar to Twitter’s Trends and Yahoo’s Trending Now features, which contain links to search results for topics that are currently popular among their users.

Twitter.com Trends

Yahoo.com Trending Now

Popular Now Links – The first of the Popular Now features is the one that is always remains visible in the lower right corner of Bing’s homepage. This section contains 4 links to SERPs for the current days trending topics and often include celebrities in the news, sporting events, television shows, movies, product releases and recalls, and general pop culture trends. These 4 tend to be the hottest items that are consistently popular throughout the day.

Bing Homepage Popular Now Visible Links

Popular Now Search Box Dropdown List – The second of the Popular Now features is one that I would venture to guess few people, relatively speaking, know about. It is their Popular Now dropdown list that can only be found in the homepage search box. This list contains links to search result pages for other popular trending topics. This list will vary throughout the day as news and events become more and less popular to searchers. It will often vary from hour to hour and from minute to minute, especially during higher search usage times of the day.

Bings Popular Now Dropdown List in the Homepage Search Box

The combination of these Popular Now features, along with the daily changing homepage background images and interactive boxes makes the Bing homepage one of my daily stops.

Only 25 more days to go…

Take The Challenge & Spread The Word

Yea, I’m a Search Geek. If you are too, then you might want to think about taking the challenge yourself or maybe tell a friend.

Tweet > “Take The Bing Challenge”

Tweet that > “I’m Taking The Bing Challenge”

What do you think of the Bing’s search engine features, options and tools? Feel free to leave a comment.

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