New Bing Toolbar Released

Bing released a brand new browser Toolbar February 17th for Internet Explorer version 7 and up. Bing is calling it, take a guess... Bing Bar. In a departure from traditional toolbars, the Bing Bar has quite a bit of functionality built in. The key difference in the Bing Bar is the inclusion of a drop down mini-window that displays content when the user presses one of the icons on the bar. For example, clicking the Facebook icon drops down a mini-window that can display your Facebook feed, friend requests, a collage of recent friends' photos, plus more.

Here's a full list of all the features the mini-window can display -

Most of the new features have a great deal of integration built in, for example the email feature generates an alert when you get a new email, it appears then fades away. News also has alerts, as does weather which has active advisories show up.

By default, the new Bing Bar "phones home" (the check box to share your browsing information is selected by default) giving Bing a virtual firehose of user information. That information received from the Bing Bar does tie into how they rank Web sites, so be aware they are using this data. We'll cover that in more detail in a separate news item, but do be aware that if you leave the check box checked when you install the Bing Bar, your complete history is available to Bing even when you're not using the Bing Search engine.

Bing has a video available that reviews all the new additions you might en...