Bing Advanced Search Tricks You Should Know

How to get better results from your Bing searches

Bing is one of the world's most popular search engines, but are you using it to its fullest potential? Like most search engines, there are ways to perform advanced searches on Bing to drastically cut down the results and ultimately display the answers you're looking for.

Below are various advanced search tips you might not know you can use on Microsoft's search engine.

Bing isn't the only search engine that accepts advanced keywords and other time-saving features. If you prefer Google, for example, there are advanced Google Search commands available.

Reverse Image Search on Bing

A Bing image match search is an easy way to find pictures that look like another image. You do this not by using text like a normal search, but instead by giving Bing the image you want to use as reference.

Select the image button on the home page to browse your computer for the image or snap a new picture with your webcam. You can also provide the photo's URL.

Bing Visual Search options

After running the search using an image, you can find others that look like yours, locate related searches, find which websites are using that picture, and more.

Bing's Advanced Video Search Options

There are several advanced search options when looking for videos on Bing. They're stored in a hidden toolbar that's only visible after selecting Filter.

nature videos search results on bing

You can use these search options to quickly refine the results to videos that are less than five minutes long, 5-20 minutes in length, or over 20 minutes long. There's also a date filter so you'll see only the items posted within the last 24 hours, or videos from the last week, month, or year. Resolution, source, and price filters are also available when looking up videos on Bing.

Putting it all together, you can use Bing's advanced video search to locate, for example, only the longer, 1080p videos that were uploaded to Dailymotion within the last day.

Up-to-Date News on Bing

Similar to Bing's video search options, you can find recent news over any topic with the Bing News advanced search filters. You can sort the news by most recent and even filter out everything that's older than the last hour to ensure that you're getting the most recent news possible.

Bing News advanced search results for weather

AI-Assisted Results on Bing

Bing is one of only a few search engines that includes an AI chatbot. It's far more advanced than Bing's normal search engine, so you can ask it all kinds of questions using natural language. Select Chat on Bing to use Bing AI.

Bing Chat results for new hobby ideas

Symbols to Streamline Your Bing Searches

These Bing search modifiers are other ways to get better results when searching for things:

Bing Advanced Search Options
Symbol Example What It Does
+ +lifewire +help Finds web pages that contain all the terms preceded by the + symbol
" " "contact us" Finds the exact words in a phrase
() site:lifewire.com -(iPod tablet) Finds or excludes web pages that contain a group of words
AND, & house AND sale Finds web pages that contain all the terms or phrases (this is how normal searches work by default, and it's an example of a Boolean search)
NOT, - lifewire -iOS Excludes web pages that contain a term or phrase
OR, | iPod OR iPhone Finds web pages that contain either of the terms or phrases

NOT and OR Bing operators have to be capitalized for the search engine to understand them as they're explained in the table above.

Here's an example using a few of these symbols to drastically cut back the results (from thousands to just a dozen) to help find what we're looking for:

site:lifewire.com "mp4 file"

Advanced Bing Search Operators

The following are other search tips you can use to narrow down search results on Bing:

Bing Advanced Search Terms
Keyword Example What It Does
contains: tennis contains:gif Keeps results focused on sites that have links to the file types that you specify
ext: example resume ext:docx Returns only web pages with the file extension that you specify
filetype: filetype:pdf Returns only web pages created in the file type that you specify
inanchor:, inbody:, intitle: intitle:2019 inbody:wimbledon Returns only web pages that contain the specified term in the metadata
language: tennis language:fr Returns only web pages for a certain language (requires the language code)
loc:, location: loc:US Returns only web pages from a specific country/region. To focus on two or more, use a logical OR to group them (requires the country or region code)
prefer: tennis prefer:history Adds emphasis to a search term or another operator to help focus the results
site: site:lifewire.com iPhone Returns web pages that belong to a specific website. Also works for TLDs (such as site:edu)
feed: feed:technology Finds RSS or Atom feeds about the search term
hasfeed: site:cnn.com hasfeed:world Finds web pages that contain an RSS or Atom feed on a website for the terms you search for

Don't include a space after the colon in any of these advanced queries.

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