Microsoft has begun testing a new service that the company hopes will get more users searching with Bing. In an effort to help boost usage of the platform and make it easier to find internal links with the engine, the company is testing Bing for Business.
Earlier today, Bing for Business was spotted by Walking Cat and while he didn’t say what this service is, I was able to dig in a bit and uncover how Microsoft will be using this new tool. Bing for Business is currently in a private beta and allows a company to inject their own search results into Bing for searches performed on company-owned devices.
For example, HR has a payroll portal but you can’t remember the URL; if your company is using Bing for Business, you will be able to search using Bing to find your internal URLs. As you would expect, these intranet pages can only be accessed from inside the corporate firewall and are not visible to the outside world.
The idea is pretty simple, make it easier to search the intranet with Microsoft’s search engine. When a user does search, the intranet results will appear at the top of the web search results in their own unique section.
I don’t know when this product will come out of private beta and it’s possible that it may never become an outward facing service but with that being said, the company is and will continue to experiment with new ways to get more users to search using Bing instead of Google.