Bing steps out the Search Box with new design

The Bing team has announced a major design refresh, introducing a new logo and combining its semantic and social search options in a single pane to the right of the search box.

Designed to "instantly feel at home alongside all Microsoft products," the changes are said to reflect the growing presence of Bing across Microsoft's various devices and services.

"Since the beginning of Bing, we've set out to do search differently," said Scott Erickson, a senior director on the Bing brand team.

"We felt that indexing information was important but we know magic doesn't come from just giving a list of a zillion links.

"Magic comes from people being able to do things with the information they find and from empowering people to do what they need.

"Providing clarity and context for what matters."

Here's a closer look at the new Bing logo:

Bing Manager of UX Experiences Lawrence Ripsher echoed this sentiment.

"We can now speak to our Xbox consoles to find and interact with digital entertainment," he said.

"Our Windows Phones offer contextually relevant suggestions and can translate languages in real time.

"Bing image search is now part of Word, and Bing Maps part of Excel. Bing is now an important service layer for Microsoft, and we wanted to create a new brand identity to reflect its companywide role.

One of the biggest design updates in the new Bing is a combined region on the right side of the search results page that displays related content both from your social networks and from "entity" entries about people, places and things.

You can see an example below in the search results page for a query on "Katy Perry.

Another new feature, dubbed "Page Zero," helps you find what you're looking for before you see a results page.

Start to type a query, and Page Zero will show you content that's likely to be helpful before you hit "Enter.

Microsoft claims Page Zero can also help you filter out results you don't want by letting you disambiguate between similar or related topics.

For example, if you type "Jon Stewart" into the text box, you can use Page Zero to indicate whether you want content about "The Daily Show" or just the man himself:

Sometimes there's virtually no ambiguity about the information you need, of course. For those cases, Bing now features a new module at the top of the page, which puts that information front and centre:

What do you think about the new Bing updates? Tell us your thoughts below