Bing has been, quietly, hard at work at expanding the Bing knowledge repository to currently feature hundreds of millions of people, places, things – and their relationships between each-other. Remember when I mentioned how Bing had partnered up with Klout to start creating personal snapshots to add to their people snapshots? Well that was back in October of 2013; and since then that database has gotten huge. So this past weekend Bing introduced a way for all webmasters to take advantage of this database with the use of the Bing Knowledge Widget.
It’s an easy-to-deploy, JavaScript-based widget for webmasters that detects and visualizes entities on the webpage and displays rich information about the entity directly on your website. Depending on the settings you choose a visitor to your site need simply hover over the objects you’ve selected in the backend to see the widget come to life along the right-hand side of the screen, showcasing content related to each entity, directly from Bing’s knowledge repository.
You can easily configure how the Bing Knowledge Widget will visualize the entities detected on your website. There are three pre-defined options:
- Entity Images: when you select this option entities that are detected will appear only as images in a vertical carousel alongside the page.
- Entity Images & Links: when you select this option entities that are detected will appear both as images in a vertical carousel alongside the page as well as links within the text of the page. This is the most popular option.
- Entity Links: when you select this option, entities that are detected will appear as links within the text of the page.
When you have chosen a visualization option that includes entity links, you can set the link style associated with these entity links. Furthermore you can choose to set a custom CSS class – giving you full control over the styling of the entity links. Furthermore you can choose to skip content within certain CSS classes from being detected by the Bing Knowledge Widget. This would be ideal for you’re sidebar content, for example.
You can check out a demo of the Bing Knowledge Widget in action here; or generate one for your own website here. If you’d like to dig a bit deeper into the different customization settings available feel free to head on over to the dedicated Bing Knowledge Widget Help & How To page.