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]

@mayusuf  
I am having problems with the sidebar search - any ideas how to fix this, please? Needless to say, the problem goes away as soon as I open a new tab.

Thanks!

[#3]

@mayusuf I have seen that you "added" the new sidebar search into Microsoft edge. But, for some reason, the sidebar search doesn't work for me. I already sent feedback to the team at Microsoft edge. I am currently using Microsoft edge 98 and this started when you first added the sidebar search feature. 

[#4]

Hi @mayusuf:

In the InPrivate version of Microsoft Edge for Windows 10, when I try to search a Japanese item, it returns mostly Chinese results, and some Japanese Results.

[#5]

Hey, @mayusuf 

To be honest, this sidebar search feature is very very very disappointing to me, I've tried to contact the Microsoft team, but they say that they are working on it. But, its been 10 updates, and its still not fixed, 2 Microsoft edge version(currently using microsoft edge 99), and I would really like this "feature" to be fixed, please, fix this. 

[#6]

I like the idea that you can search selected text in the sidebar with ctrl+shift+e, while staying on the same page.
But why isn't there a shortcut to close this side bar? I've tried Esc doesn't work.