Bing Unveils International Hotel Booking for 22 Countries Including India

Microsoft on Thursday announced two new updates to Bing search - international hotel booking support across 22 countries including India, improved Bing's mobile search results.

In partnership with TripAdvisor, Bing will now allow users to internationally book hotels across 22 different countries in 14 different languages. Users will also directly get rates, and reviews for different hotels from Bing search via TripAdvisor.

The complete list of countries include - Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the Netherland, the US and the UK.

The company has also updated its mobile search results. Microsoft says that the update is one of the multiple planned optimisations which will arrive in the coming weeks. Now the results include extra facts, star ratings, deep site links, time-stamps, URL breadcrumbs, file type notification for non-HTML pages, and more.

Meanwhile, Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it has started integrating its Bing search technology into its Office suite of apps, starting with Word Online. The capability will be added automatically and users are not required to do anything.

The new "Insights for Office" allows users to Bing search through Office documents online. Users can also do a right click on a highlighted word or phrase and select Insights from the menu for relevant information from a variety of sources like Bing Snapshot, Wikipedia, Bing Image Search, Oxford English Dictionary and the web.

Additionally, Microsoft has brought enhanced support for Find and Edit in Word functions for pdf files. With Find, users can now copy text from an image and search via the Find button located on top tool bar. To convert pdf into an editable Word document, user also has a Edit in Word button alongside Find.