Forum Discussion
MicrosoftIntroducing sidebar search in Microsoft Edge
Hello Insiders! We have heard your feedback and are excited to announce sidebar search - the first step in our evolution of contextual search in the new Microsoft Edge.
Sidebar search builds off the foundation we began with "Ask Cortana" in the previous version of Microsoft Edge and addresses feedback we received when "Ask Cortana" didn't meet your needs.
With sidebar search, you can highlight a word or phrase, right click, and select “Search in sidebar” from the context menu. Search results show up in a pane on the right side of the page showing you web results like definitions, web links, images, videos and many more Bing services which are related to the query.
We have added some new features to improve relevance and to provide user requested functionality that was absent in "Ask Cortana". In addition to the web results, you now see image and video verticals which show results related to the highlighted word or phrase. If you are signed into your azure active directory account at work, you can now see company results.
Sidebar search is a persistent pane in the tab in which it was opened, which gives you the option to close the pane or look up additional information related to other words using the search box. There’s more – if you want a full view of web results, you can now click on the “Open in new tab” button which opens the web results in a new tab.
You can expect to see sidebar begin to roll out in Microsoft Edge Dev and Canary channels very soon!
Thanks - Microsoft Edge Search team
124 Replies
mayusuf Cool, thanks for this nifty tool, I enjoyed it a lot.
Please enable search with Google
Make Search Engine Configurable so you can add, and select to use, ANY search engine or search provider of choice. Don't limit users to Bing or Google. Yandex, Duck Duck Go, Alta-Vista and all the others help for various use cases.
Make a Search Configurator in Settings to select which/add any search engine/provider. This would improve Edge, not take use/users away from Bing. People who want to Bing It! are going to.
BYOSE (Bring Your Own Search Engine) would be a great ENHANCEMENT.
scrbl You can add your own search engine. Anytime you visit a website that could be used as a search engine, it adds an option. That also includes websites you don't think of as search engines such as Wikipedia, library of congress, and YouTube. You can also manually add one in. You can see which ones you have available here:
edge://settings/searchEngines
- Omg, I missed this feature so much!
I am not able to see any option for sidebar search whereas some people can access it. Please tell what to do.
Ekansh0202 I think it may be in a/b testing, which would explain why some people can use it and others cant.
- I found this unexpectedly in my Mac Canary build earlier today because I right-clicked to search the web for a highlighted phrase and was DELIGHTED to see the sidebar search available! Thank you! Works exactly as expected (for me) and seems to render search results well.
It did take me a while to notice the floating blue "Open in new tab" button -- I sort of expected an icon near the top right for that -- but now I see it, yup, that's perfect.seancorfield Is everyone else able to close the sidebar once open, because I'm stuck with it until I close the tab.
- Awesome, I was waiting for this basic, yet very important functionality for the very first build of Microsoft Edge (chromium).
mayusuf If Microsoft Edge ships with this crap to bloat the context menu, without the settings to turn it off, I'll immediately stop using Edge and return to Google Chrome.
Stop shoving Bing crap into my browser, and stop hijacking my context menu.
LonesomeDrifter2 That's actually not a bad idea. I remember hearing that this was one of the features in Netscape and one of the biggest reasons Netscape lost to IE was because it was bloated with unnecessary stuff. Edge should have an menu tab labeled something and contain features that could be turned off to speed up the browser.
mayusuf I really like the sidebar so far! I've run into a few problems though.
1. I have to scroll left and right sometimes because the page doesn't fit in the sidebar. An easy fix would be to render code in the sidebar in mobile mode.
2. I can't close the sidebar. The only way to get out of it is to do Ctrl+K and close the tab with the sidebar in it.
3. There is way to go back to the previous page, for example if I hit the wrong link, I have to open the sidebar and do everything again.
- You can close clicking inside the sidebar with mouse right button then in the big dark gray space, click with mouse left button.
Looks like there's bug that not allow appear the close button. 
mayusufcjc2112 Thank you for your feedback! We're glad you're giving Sidebar Search a try.
In case you missed it, if you scroll up, you'll see a close button beside the search box. We have also added a right click context menu in sidebar search which includes close and back options. Right now, sidebar search should show only bing pages, please send feedback via the feedback tool in Edge with details on your experience on seeing non-bing web pages in sidebar search. We will look into those cases.
Thanks!
