Bing's Autosuggest Integrates Query History
Personalized search suggestions now available from historical search clues.
Bing has made an update to its query suggestion feature that incorporates a bit of personalization. Since many web users tend to return to similar search topics, it makes sense to incorporate relevant terms into query suggestions. And that’s just what Bing has done with its Autosuggest feature. It will now take query history into consideration when serving up suggested keywords.
Suggestions based on query history are in purple, similar to a visited link. The other suggestions are in blue, similar to an unvisited link.
If you don’t want Bing all up in your query history, serving up search suggestions, you can set your preferences by clicking “Manage History” when the search suggestion box pops up.
Before you get all in a tizzy and tell us that Google’s already doing this, we know. They integrated query history into Suggest last May.
For comparison purposes, I’ve included a screenshot of Google’s suggestions for the same query. I don’t know which ones are based on my history. Fewer seem to be since I searched both Google and Bing in the past month for quite a few of the same knitting-related queries. The location-based suggestions are about 2,000 miles off. In this case, Bing’s suggestions (above) were much better tailored to me.
