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
- I like it. I really needed it much.
Just a quick thought. Maybe there could be a choice to switch to a different search engine? I love this feature! Keep up the great work! mayusuf
I find this feature quite useful, especially if I need to quickly get a definition for a word.
AaronMcHale wrote:I find this feature quite useful, especially if I need to quickly get a definition for a word.
There is a faster way and it is not limited to Edge which means you can use it anywhere. just press Windows button on your keyboard on on the screen and start typing. that's it. you get definition and a lot of other things.
- Sidebar as an alternative for Cortana !!?
isn't Cortana supposed to be an AI assistant? sidebar is a simple area to do searches and browse. - While it seems it should be available, I don't see this option in the context menu when I right-click in Microsoft Edge Beta Build 85.0.564.18
From a few days in the Canary Channel, the sidebar search is not working properly. The issue is that when I select to search a word or phrase in the sidebar, the sidebar opens like it is a tab with bing's normal webpage version with horizontal and vertical scrolling. If you open any other website from there, it opens in the sidebar in a vertical format like it should have been on the Bing sidebar search plus there is no close button to close the sidebar forcing me to close the whole tab.
I have sent feedback about this issue with the diagnostics through the in-app feedback tool.
mayusufTheShaunSaw Thank you for the feedback! We are working on a fix for this issue.
