We looked at Bing Desktop when it was in Beta. At that time, one of its more notable features was allowing you to set the Bing image of the day as your desktop wallpaper. Now more features have been added including inline search for documents and PDFs.
New Bing Desktop Features
According to the Bing Blog, over 10 million users have downloaded Bing Desktop and the company has added some impressive new features. In addition to searching the web, it still allows you to set your Wallpaper as the Bing image of the day, and go back and select different ones.
It also includes quick access to trending videos, photos, news items, and access to what’s happening on Facebook.
It provides up-to-date weather information and you can add up to three different cities.
In Settings you can change the way Bing Desktop looks, topics that appear in the toolbar, and turn on inline search.
Bing Desktop Inline Search
Inline search allows you to search directly from Word docs, PDFs, and Webpages. Just highlight the word or phrase you want to search and click the Bing icon. Here’s an example of using it on a webpage.
It gives you a preview of search results in a Window that pops up while still in the document. This is more convenient and less obtrusive than opening a separate browser screen.
I normally don’t recommend adding any type of extra toolbar to your browser or desktop, as most of them are spammy and worthless. But, I’ve always used Bing Desktop on my Windows 7 machines, and now it’s even better.
7 Comments
Leave a Reply
Leave a Reply
Magno
Bing is cool. Love Bing.
smcapps
Once you have selected a phrase (anywhere – Word, website, pdf),
Ctl-C to copy
Keyboard shortcut to open Google or Bing
Ctl-V to paste in the search field
Enter
Give the mouse a rest. The keyboard is your friend.
Clint
I thought I’d never get to your link, thanks. I’m really starting to love Bing.
Brian Burgess
@Clint I switched my default search provider from Google to Bing on all of my computers and mobile devices about four months ago. And I’ve been really happy with it. It has come a long way. It’s starting to gain a lot of steam with tools like this and integration in other services.
At WWDC yesterday, Apple announced that Bing will be the search provider for Siri
SCTrojan
I’m not seeing the previous wallpapers anymore. I don’t see any mention of it in the settings pages either. Where am I missing or is this something that has, since your article, been removed?
Brian Burgess
It should still be there. Click the “i” icon right next to the search box.
SCTrojan
Thanks, @Brian Burgess. I was hovering over it not clicking it and I’ve used it 100s of times…sometimes the old brain gets blocked by the simplest of tasks.