Introducing sidebar search in Microsoft Edge

[mayusuf]

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

[#2]

@eguif Thanks for the feedback. The shortcut should open the sidebar in invocation in Microsoft Edge Dev. Please can you confirm if you are still seeing this issue?

[#3]

@Peter Dennington Thank you for the feedback! We recently implemented a change which pins the search header. You can now access the search box and close button as you scroll.

[#4]

@rfreitaz Thanks for the feedback! This issue is now fixed.

[#5]

@TheShaunSaw Thank you for the feedback! We are working on a fix for this issue.

[#6]

Hello @mayusuf 

Yes, it's working well
Thank you

[#7]

@mayusuf Please let us disable it, it's annoying when accidently used when not meant to, and how much longer does the right-click menu have to be before you guys knock off the bloat?

[#8]

@mayusuf  Why X is inactive ? i must close whole tab to close this search tab.

[#9]

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 

[#10]

I like it. I really needed it much.

[#11]

@mayusufIn response to @MissyQ on Reddit, Cortana in Classic Edge was able to find better deals when shopping online, find related articles when reading news articles online. Basically, everything Cortana did in Classic Edge was pretty useful. I understand if that's not the direction Cortana is going right now, but they were nice features and I would at least like to know whether the team has considered it.

[#12]

Suggestion: the shortcut key Ctrl+Shift+E is great but it'd be better if I could toggle sidebar search without needing to highlight any word. This is useful when I just want to quickly search something but don't want it in a new tab. 

[#13]

@Rob84MK 

sidebar search works correct now.

[#14]

@mayusuf 

Ctrl+Shift+E still not working on either the released version 87.0.664.66 or edge dev version 89.0.731.0

sidebar search works fine from the context menu

[#15]

Cool idea, nice feature (only learning about it now).

I accidentally clicked 'Search Bing in sidebar' instead of 'Search the web for' which I always use.

Like I said, I like the idea (quick search to the side without loosing flow + context from the page you're in).

But it's Bing, and it's useless with Bing. Who uses Bing??

Needs a search-engine selection, just like the other search-providers. Otherwise you can search but you'll never find anything.

[#16]

I've used Bing for years, as have a lot of people here. Bing is much better about privacy than Google. And with Bing, you get rewards -- who doesn't like rewards? :)

[#17]

@seancorfield Good for you, and others.  But still, Microsoft need to stop forcing Bing on users: have it as the default, sure, but ultimately take no for an answer.

Edge: if the user changes from Bing to another search-provider, they still try to sneak it in via the "Search Bing in sidebar for ..." option, and the New Tab page, which the user cannot change to load anything other than the built-in offering without resorting to a third-party extension.

Android: if you have the Outlook app installed, then whenever you select text in an app you'll see a "Bing search" option.  Google really should treat this as malware and block the pop-up menu addition.

Microsoft Office: some features, such as word definition look-ups, word translations and image search, use Bing

Default to Bing, sure, but stop trying to force it everywhere!

[#18]

@mayusuf I really hate this Bing option. I don't care if Bing is good. I don't care about the quality of Bing search engine. What I am specifically looking for is a way to disable this annoying crappy menu. 

Instead of providing choice and honesty, the microsoft edge engineering team specifically chose to compromise ethics in order to push for a microsoft product - literally the opposite of why chromium was created in the first place. 

The reason the menu exists is to intentionally confuse users and increase bing clicks. 

The features was specifically designed to maximize annoyance and confusion. 

This went so far as the microsoft team running focus groups studies to see how users would perceive the feature, and they crafted that context menu in a way that in all possible situations the "search bing in the sidebar" menu would be read and perceived first. 

I think more effort was spent in creating this feature to be as annoying and disgusting as the effect that it causes on you. 

I really feel like a hostage because of this psychological manipulation simply because I know how this feature was designed and the tactics used. 

And what is worse, to silence all complaints, the Microsoft edge community managers instead of reporting comments, they create fake users giving positive comments in order to manipulate community members into submission. 

[#19]

For example, the edge team went out of their way to confuse users who chose to change their search engine on the browser.
Very early on they figured out that people hated the Bing brand so much, and that Google search was so strong, that they would not be successful in pushing Bing search in edge because one of the first thing people would do is change their search engine.

And to be honest, really, the tactics being employed with regards to UI and choice manipulation is a big reason that support the notion that microsoft products in general, like the old hotmail.com (now outlook.com), bing, msn, office, windows, and now especially edge - microsoft products are so awful they actually generate disgust and frustration in users.

[#20]

@EdgeEnemyDueToBing Well, I think Edge should allow user to choose any search engine they want for the sidebar. Since most search engines have mobile-optimized edition, Edge can set the sidebar to open the mobilized search result page by altering user-agent strings. Then it can let the links there to be opened in new tab with the default user-agent.

Also, after selecting texts, the "..." floating menu always show "use bing search" item. Edge should allow user to customize this shortcut menu.

[#21]

@lishuhang "Well, I think Edge should allow user to choose any search engine they want for the sidebar"

Microsoft Edge engineers poured a lot of effort into this one to make sure the option is as hostile to user choice and tampering as they could. 

There's a very simple reason why they need the search engine to be hard to tamper: they have found out that user's will switch back to google search or some other service because user's really hate the bing and brand quality. 

Culturally, bing, internet explorer, windows, edge, really, all microsoft products are always known for their lack of quality. 

While temporarily some may claim that there are some good products within microsoft, in the end, simply because the microsoft culture is a culture of dishonesty and manipulation, the organization will eventually return to its roots. We're seeing it happen with very quickly with edge, with vscode, etc.