Bing Tests New Featured Snippets Tabs

First, let me acknowledge that although its not so good reputation over the years, it seems that Microsoft is working hard to close the gap behind Google. I mean, not in its market share, there is not a real competition out there:

In the sense of technology and presenting better results – Bing search is getting advanced.

In last February Bing had announced its multi-perspective answers which was supposed to be the type of their sophisticated take on featured snippet:

That adds up to their expandable featured snippets feature from last year.

However, today I’ve noticed for the first time Bing is testing Featured snippets tabs:

In other words – you can click on the tabs and see a snippet of the main topics of this idea. Moreover, in this example – you can see the tab “all methods” which this headline or even words doesn’t exist in the main article.

It seems that Bing is sophisticated enough to phrase this page, show and distinguish between the first method and all the other methods. Quite neat.

From the selected search I’ve conducted I’ve realized the sheer amount of this kind of featured snippets are taken from Wikipedia, which isn’t surprising especially when their use of anchor links make it very easy to understand the page’s structure. For example:

And this is how you will see it in the search results:

I liked that they even mention the copyright license, I haven’t seen it before either (Bing nor Google).

Lately, we even have seen some featured snippets in Google containing pdf files!

Another interesting take is to see that these results are not always rank in the first position (or shall I say position 0):

Or even below the fold:

Are you able to replicate this on your side? Would Google try to replicate it? Time will tell.

update

I spotted today another small but really interesting change.

If you search for a brand name with local stores, you might see an additional site links which can be seen outside the main sitelinks structure. They point to the login page and store locator page.

For example – Lowe’s & Gap:

I wrote lately about the importance of branded keywords, and Bing is no exception, your brand is who you are. Don’t forget to research and optimize for it.