Bing Launches Election Portal

Source: http://searchengineland.com/bing-launched-elections-portal-filter-news-by-party-social-integration-maps-more-137681

Last week, Bing announced a new web portal to track the upcoming US Presidential Election –  bing.com/elections.  Democrats and Republicans can filter news by their respective views through the use of a “slider” tool they can slide left or right depending on their preferences.  While only some news sites are sourcing the new content of the site (Politico, Real Clear Politics, The Cook Political Report, Huffington Post and Associated Press), it does give visitors the unique ability to filter stories and news sources based on their specific political views.  The portal also offers, “a real-time interactive map with national, state and local election results from two sources including The Cook Political Report and Real Clear Politics…a social section that pulls out select social interactions in real time from Twitter and Facebook…a polling place finder for people to learn where they should vote…general information about the candidates and additional videos, stories and images.”  

Did Bing launch this portal to directly compete with Google’s election portal that launched in January 2012?  Perhaps, however, Google’s portal has a similar look and feel to its “Google News” portal – while site visitors can search and read articles that they deem most relevant, unlike Bing’s portal, the Google portal does not give visitors the option to customize based on political party or views.