Bing has recently announced a new feature which, they claim, will be able to reduce the total time it takes for people to get from typing in a search, to having the content they want in front of them by up to 50%. This is on top of the reduced search time from the implementation of snapshot & auto-suggest improvements which were put in place in May of this year. Those updates claimed to be able to provide search results 33% faster than without the feature. The latest update uses a “pre-rendering” feature to help display a page almost instantly upon clicking the link in the Bing SERPs.
Currently, this feature is only available to users of Internet Explorer 11 because it takes advantage of the browser’s pre-render tag. The new feature works by automatically downloading and rendering the top result page in the background. This is done in a streamlined way which will not waste bandwidth or battery life, according to the blog post from Bing about this new feature.
With about half the people performing searches clicking on the first result on the SERPs, this will allow most searchers to have the page ‘pre-loaded’ when they click the first result. This will obviously reduce the amount of time they are waiting for the page to load significantly. This is the first wide-scale use of the pre-render tag that I’m aware of, though Bing has called on website developers to learn more about, and use the pre-render tag to enhance the experience of those visiting the page.
This is just the latest feature from Bing to attempt to speed up the process of search. They are clearly putting significant focus on becoming the fastest search engine on the market today, which could be used as a marketing point in the future against Google, especially if they can get the search times significantly lower than Google’s.
For more information about the pre-render feature in Bing’s search, you can see their blog post HERE.
