Last week Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced a new search enhancement on the Bing community blog. The new feature is called Action Buttons.

With the addition of Action Buttons, Bing presents the top three activities people tend to want to do when accessing one of seven kinds of websites with buttons adjacent to the search result.

For example, if you search for an airline, you would be presented with Check in, Flight Status and Book a Flight buttons adjacent to the search result. It's a brilliant idea, at least on its face. But a quick check shows it's not working quite as described just yet--at least not consistently.

According to the blog post, it should work as follows: "...when you search across 7 popular categories--including airlines, couriers (e.g. FedEx), restaurants, banks, rental cars, software downloads and hotels--you will be presented with buttons for top actions on the site, that directly take you to the page where you can complete your task."

A quick check of two airlines worked just fine, but when I tried searching for a local bank and restaurant near where I live, I didn't get the buttons as described. And when I searched for FedEx, I got just two buttons, Locations and Contact Us.

If these buttons were to work consistently as advertised--that is, use an algorithm and then display the three top actions in the form of a button--it would simplify searching and locating popular pages, and save a click or two. From that point of view, it could be very useful. Now, they just need to implement it right.

For more information:
- see the Bing Community blog post

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