Microsoft's Bing Comes To Hotmail's Inbox

Hotmail users can now decide and Bing, in a limited way, right from their e-mail inboxes. While not the sort of thing likely to cause people to switch from Gmail, the feature shows Microsoft has some clues about leveraging one online service off another.

"With Hotmail’s quick add feature, now enhanced with Bing, you can easily search, find, and insert content from the web straight into your e-mail messages. With just one click you can add restaurant reviews, movie times, images, videos, maps and more," Microsoft said yesterday in a blog post announcing the enhancement.

The search categories are limited and so are the geographies where the new feature is available. Hotmail users in Australia, Canada, China, India, US, and UK are the only ones able to Bing from their inboxes.

There is no comparable feature, yet, within Bing that allows users to easily add collections of search results to e-mail. The recent release of Yahoo's Search Pad feature is, however, likely to push both Google and Microsoft to explore new ways for users to share search results.

David Coursey tweets as techinciter and can be reached via his website.