Microsoft made some significant announcements related to Bing at SMX Advanced in Seattle. Later this summer, Bing will offer a redesigned version of Bing Webmaster Tools based on feedback from webmasters. The tools will provide webmasters with a simplified, more intuitive experience that delivers a comprehensive view of how Bing indexes their sites, a representative for Bing tells WebProNews.

 Highlights include:

- The Bing Webmaster Tools have been re-engineered from the ground up to offer more data, including enhanced charting functionality, through a modern, improved user interface. The new tools remain web-based, and basic functionality will be available through most web browsers.

- The tools assess performance in several key areas, including crawl, index and traffic. Each area will offer granular data going back as far as six months with enhanced, on-the-fly adjustable charting, enabling webmasters to focus on the timeline trends that are most meaningful to them.

- The update also includes a new experience built with Silverlight, featuring rich visual charts to help webmasters quickly analyze several months of data to identify trends and drive insights.

Update: Bing's Eric Gilmore tells us about the new Bing Webmaster Tools in the following interview:

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Bing also announced social search, which uses public updates from Fan Pages and aggregated data from public updates to deliver real-time results. Doug Caverly talks more about this here.