{"id":7796,"date":"2019-07-02T07:30:30","date_gmt":"2019-07-02T14:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/garage-en-us\/?p=7796"},"modified":"2019-07-02T10:37:22","modified_gmt":"2019-07-02T17:37:22","slug":"outings-graduates-bringing-new-destination-search-experiences-to-bing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/garage\/blog\/2019\/07\/outings-graduates-bringing-new-destination-search-experiences-to-bing\/","title":{"rendered":"Outings graduates, bringing new destination search experiences to Bing"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Garage empowers Microsoft employees to explore demand for new products and features through tangible experiments. Outings, a Microsoft Garage project<\/a>, an app for iOS and Android released in December 2017<\/a>\u00a0and has since\u00a0generated the feedback, usage, and buzz required to confirm the sponsoring Bing team hypotheses that travel and destination search is an area for continued investment. The team has integrated insights from user\u2019s interest and feedback into Bing.com<\/a> and Bing Search apps<\/a>, and the project is officially graduating from The Garage.<\/p>\n

An experiment designed to explore new search<\/h3>\n

Bing has always had a strong culture of experimentation and the product was built from the ground up to enable efficient experimentation. \u201cOur culture has always been: experiment, fail fast, learn fast\u2014our Bing.com infrastructure is built to equip engineers to flight and A\/B test new features,\u201d shares Jyot Patel, the Engineering Manager of Outings and a Principal Software Engineer on the Bing team.<\/p>\n

While the team had access to this state-of-the art testing infrastructure, they built dedicated mobile apps to more acutely test an experience that presents users with possible destinations of interest. Outings identifies rich content from online travel blogs and curates it into bite-sized attractions, or outings, that users can browse through. It\u2019s powered by a data pipeline that mines meta-data in popular travel blogs, which debuted in the Outings experience. The focused apps allowed the team to hone the relevance of the new data type and get clear feedback and ratings on the experience to zero in on users\u2019 interest in curated travel content.<\/p>\n

Once they observed the positive feedback for Outings, the team knew they had to scale the experience to more users on both desktop and mobile.<\/p>\n

Outings insights scaled to Bing.com and Bing mobile experiences<\/h3>\n

Oswaldo Ribas is a Principal Program Manager working on The Bing Attractions and Outdoors team which helps users discover attractions and destinations that they might want to visit, see, and experience, and in the process, help them map their experience. \u201cOur goal is to continuously improve these scenarios.\u201d He worked closely with the Outings team to explore what they\u2019d learned about user experience and their technical approach through their experiment. “The work will surface in a number of places including the search results page and the Maps vertical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bing has long had dedicated search result experiences for maps, travel, and destinations, and the insights and technology from Outings will fold into Bing in three chief ways.<\/p>\n