Bing introduces pre-render in IE11: loads main results in the background

The people behind Bing are on a mission to help us spend less time searching and more time doing things. That is what they claim in a new post on their blog in which for the first time they introduce the pre-render function of Internet Explorer 11 in their browser.

According to their research, most of the time spent in searches is spent doing the same tasks and visiting multiple pages. In summary, a typical search process requires several steps: write what we want to search for, wait for the results, select one of them and wait for it to load.This can take between 30 and 60 seconds and at Bing they want to reduce that time.

One way is by decreasing the number of steps required in a typical search. They have been working on it for some time, with Snapshot, cards that show the answer to what was searched for directly on the results page; or improvements in search suggestions and autocompletion. This week they try to keep cutting that time with the introduction of pre-rendering .

The new feature is available for Internet Explorer 11, so that whenever we perform a Bing search using the latest version of the browser the pages linked in the first results will load in the background and will open instantly once we click on them. To achieve this, it uses the IE11 pre-render tag that allows you to download web content without us noticing, taking care not to spend a lot of bandwidth in the process.

As seen in the graph, from Bing they assure that with Snapshot and the improvements in the suggestions they had already managed to reduce the time to 20-40 seconds. Now, with pre-rendering, the reduction is 50% leaving the time spent on a typical search at 15-30 seconds.

But pre-rendering is not for the exclusive use of Bing. Anyone can take advantage of this Internet Explorer 11 functionality on their website to make the experience easier for their users. From Redmond they have also taken the opportunity to make a call to web developers and designers to integrate the pre-render tag in their pages.

Via | Search Blog