Windows 8.1 touches upon almost every feature of the vanilla Windows 8, but it also comes with a bunch of new improvements — improvements like the revamped search experience offered via Bing Smart Search Guide.
And now the company seems to be using this very feature to introduce a new concept of advertisement in Windows 8.1. These new ads will run in full screen within the operating system, and provide users that search the web in the Modern UI with (what the company calls) an enhanced experience.
Bringing ads right into the OS is a fair bit risky, and the company seems to be aware of this.
In a recent post on the Windows Experience blog, the technology giant has started paving the road for ads, claiming that they will help users find information quicker:
“In Windows 8.1, when I tap on the Search charm and enter a term to search on, Bing Smart Search searches not only my PC, but also the web and SkyDrive, plus some apps and the Windows Store. I get a list of search results and suggestions as I type, or I can click the Search button search to see all of the search results.”
The post also goes over many of the key features that are available in Bing Smart Search, while suggesting that the refreshed search tool works just as great on desktop computers as it does on tablets:
“Little efficiencies like that make using my PC feel faster, easier, and quite honestly, cooler than it ever has before. I’ve noticed that the results page comes in especially handy when I’m using my Surface or my touch laptop as a tablet—it’s convenient to be able to see previews of web sites before I visit them—I can thumb through the results and flip through image searches with ease.”
These are still very early days for this feature, and as of this writing details on when Redmond plans to introduce this ad concept are not available.
However, the upcoming Spring 2014 GDR update is a pretty good guesstimate.
All Comments
Microsoft doesn’t need ads to make money unless they plan to start giving the OS away for free. Whatever they do with this I just hope it doesn’t go out of control and ruin the user experience. I wonder what their reasoning behind this was.