Explore the rich homepage

Bing always strives to bring you more, and our homepage is no exception. We offer a new image every day with special hidden hotspots that lead you to more information about the image.

• Enhance, don’t hinder search You can search before the image loads or enjoy the image without interacting with the hotspots.
• Be artful, not newsy The homepage image won’t portray daily news, but it may occasionally spotlight a newsworthy event and we frequently feature images for holidays and other planned events. For all events, we strive to ensure that the images are consistent in their artfulness.
• Strive for subtlety and poetry You don’t have to know that it’s Halloween, Columbus Day, the anniversary of 9/11, or Boss’s Day to enjoy the image.

We’ve engineered the page to load in stages. The search box, logo and explore pane load and are usable immediately. Then the picture and hotspots stream to the user unobtrusively in the background (with no progress bar). The image fades in when the download is complete.

The net effect is a white page that loads very fast and an image that comes in after the fact. You can type and click links at any point during the download — an important release criterion. If you are on a very slow modem connection, you may never see the picture. We tested this using bandwidth limiting tools on DTAPs to simulate the page loading on connections of varying bandwidths from many different parts of the U.S. and the world.

If you do not want the see the daily images and hotspots on your homepage, you can turn off this feature by simply clicking Give me the plain background below. To turn the images back on, come back to this page and click Show me the daily images.

• Give me the plain background
• Show me the daily images