Bing Shopping Gets Natural Language Price Constraint Feature

Bing has announced a new natural language search feature for Bing Shopping results. With the new capabilitiy, users should be able to use words like "under $100" or "under $50" along with their keywords to get relevant results for products that match such descriptions. 

"With help from Microsoft Research, we’ve improved how we handle price queries to deliver results that automatically reflect your budget," the Bing Shopping team writes in a blog post.  "This is especially handy when you’re on the go, and don’t have time to browse around and click the right refinements.  At the mall and wondering if you’re seeing a bargain? Just fire up the Bing for Mobile app on your phone and say ‘sony digital camera under $120′. Voila, it’s that easy."

"Under the hood, we try to detect a price constraint in your query, and intelligently adjust the results to match your criteria," the team adds. "Right now, this only works for prices, and only for US users.  This is just a small step in our journey to make search friendlier to natural language queries, and help you quickly find what you’re looking for."

The feature seems to work pretty well, based on the test queries I tried. Bing does appear to have a leg up on Google in this regards. Similar shopping searches on Google didn’t work out quite so well.

Bing recently added a new flight search suggestion feature to its search box, but that feature still appears to be in the process of rolling out. Bing’s David Lindheimer reminded me via Twitter to see if it was working, and it is still not.