Introducing sidebar search in Microsoft Edge

Microsoft

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!

 

mayusuf_1-1589991666536.png

 

Thanks - Microsoft Edge Search team

 

 

 

 

124 Replies

First: Why Kill "Ask to Cortana"?

Second: I live on Brazil, here bing never works right, so if i can choose Google over Bing on search sidebar, or better yet, make bing better on Brazil. @mayusuf 

Hi.
Sidebar search was rolled out to the Dev channel today. However it does not work on right clicking text in PDF files.
The context menu certainly does show the option to search in sidebar but it does not work on being clicked.

@mayusuf 

While I love this feature finally being available, I think the current implementation is jarring and I hope it's just a foundation for a better update in the future. There are in particular three issues that bother me:

1) First of all, I expected the Sidebar to be a flyout menu that stays above the current web page, instead it's the same container used for Collections, that pushes the webpage to the left, which is a very poor solution since it makes me loose focus on what I was reading

2) Once you summon the Sidebar, there's no visual feeback to close it, there's no close button and pressing shortcuts like ESC don't do anything. The only way to close it is to right click on the sidebar and press the Close button from the submenu

3) Using Google as the default search engine produces nasty results in the sidebar: I see the whole Google search page and I have to scroll it horizontally to see the search results. It should instead fit the sidebar width:

SOI_7_0-1593077381611.png

 

@mayusuf 

Really great feature. I can see me using this a lot. One thought for improvement... when viewing the sidebar results would it be possible to freeze the menu bar for the sidebar? Scrolling down the results in the sidebar is great but, unless there's another way, if a user wishes to close the sidebar they need to scroll back to the top of the sidebar to close it or to filter on image etc.

@TheShaunSaw Why do we need Ctrl+F and Ctrl+G?

It's likely powered by Cortana but not branded as Cortana.
Which other others are you reffering to?
I don't see it yet for me but I look forward to using it soon. I hate Chromes version where it opens a new tab.

@mayusuf Is this where we leave feedback?

 

I really missed this functionality. Back when it said "Ask Cortana" I was hoping we'd see it as system-wide feature. 

 

FEEDBACK I don't see is having an easier way to open it. At one time MS Word let you CTRL+Double-click (?) a word to open "Smart Lookup". Something similar would be nice here.

 

Bing lets you click a magnifying glass when you highlight a word. Do something similar would help discoverability of the feature.

 

 

@pbilk 
I don't know that but it would be meant for the accessibility for the users that some users would be using the former one and some the latter one.

@mayusuf 

 

On mobile, we have the option to set Bing to dark mode. When can we see the option to set it (and this new sidebar) to dark mode on desktop?

Please consider place the Close "X" button outside the iframe, just like ie6-era sidebars that those close buttons are built-in in the software itself rather than written in the webpage. Right now when connection is unstable and the search sidebar is unable to load, you can't close the bar at all. Also, please make the sidebar's width adjustable. Thanks!
Please ensure your current user-agent is the Edge default. I met the identical problem just now, and after reset the user-agent it displayed normally. I used to set the UA to Chrome since my Gmail give me scrambled filename when downloading attachments.

@NamishB 

Thank you for your feedback! We're glad you're giving Sidebar Search a try.

We are currently working on  fixing this issue. 

 

@SOI_7  

Thank you for using sidebar search and providing feedback!

Future iterations of the sidebar search UX will take of the the first and second issue that you flagged.

Regarding your 3rd issue,  All non-Bing pages should open in a new tab. Could you please send feedback via tool in Edge with some details on how you got to this experience?

 

@IMAX99  We are glad that you are using our new sidebar search feature and thank you for the feedback! Sidebar search also includes a right click context menu in with a close option. We are working on future iterations of the sidebar search feature that will make the close button even more accessible.

@rjpaulsen Thank you for using sidebar search and for your feedback! We have recently added a shortcut for sidebar search -  Ctrl+Shift+E on Windows and Cmd+Shift+E on Mac.

We are looking into ways to make sidebar search invocation faster. You can leave feedback here or via the Edge feedback tool. 

@lishuhang Thank you for using sidebar search and for your feedback! We also have a right click context menu in sidebar search which includes close and back options. We are  working on improvements to make the close button more accessible.

@F-Lambda Thank you for your feedback! We're glad you're giving Sidebar Search a try. We are working on enabling dark mode for sidebar search.

In Edge on Android, long pressing a word or phrase will open a context menu with Share and Search as options. This works well and is easily discovered. Something as intuitive (and constant) would be nice on the desktop.

Bonus points if doing so on an address opens a map.

With the sidebar search pane open (controlled by the current hot keys) I wouldn't mind seeing the search sidebar update automatically when selecting a other word or phrase.

Unlike at least one other review, I like how the page with shrinks to make room for this feature.

Yes, there needs to be a better close button.

Visually it would be nice to be separated from the web page itself. An obvious solution would be for the results to display in something like dark mode, but I can see people not liking that. A good challenge for good designer, and I know there are some over there.