Bing.com Gets Personal

If you use Bing.com as your web browser home page, you will be interested to discover some new capabilities that let you add personalized news, weather, flights, and stocks right to the page. And if you're not seeing Bing.com regularly, this new functionality may make you change your mind.

By default, Bing provides an attractive enough display, with a large Bing picture of the day and, at the bottom, a strip of "trending" Internet searches.

But now you can change this display. To do so, sign in with your Microsoft account and then visit Settings, Interests.

Here, you can enable the personalization features and then configure the following items, all of which are culled from Bing.com, Windows Phone and the Bing apps on Windows and Windows Phone:

Daily glance. Weather, commute, and news headlines.

Traffic. With incident notifications and traffic updates for your favorites places.

Headline news. News headlines that are pertinent to you and your location.

Trip planner. Flights, airport traffic, and destination weather.

Weather. The conditions, forecasts, and alerts for weather near you.

Additionally, you can add interests. For now, it's just "out and about"-type information—restaurant, museum, and nightlife recommendations based on your location—but more is coming soon.

When you return to Bing.com, you'll see that your interests are now customizing the strip of "trending" Internet searches at the bottom. It's a bit subtle in this shot, and frankly there are only two "interests"-based items so far.

The Microsoft shot suggests that this will get more relevant over time:

If you're paying attention to what's happening with Search and Windows Phone 8.1, you may recognize that this "interests"-based customization is exactly how you configure Cortana on that system. And that's no surprise, really, since Cortana is of course Bing-powered too.