First look at Microsoft Edge's Search in Sidebar feature

[Karlston]

First look at Microsoft Edge's Search in Sidebar feature

Classic Edge had a feature that allowed you to run searches in a sidebar in the web browser; Microsoft has now added an improved version called Search in Sidebar to the most recent Edge Canary version.

 

The Chromium-based Microsoft Edge web browser does not replicate the functionality of the classic Edge browser completely. Some features won't be supported by Microsoft's new browser at all, others are not yet implemented but promises. One of the latter is Search in Sidebar, a feature designed to make context-based searches more comfortable in the new Microsoft Edge browser.

 

The feature is available in the most recent Microsoft Edge Canary version at the time of writing. Microsoft plans to introduce it in Edge Beta and Stable eventually as well.

 

There is one caveat that users need to be aware of: Search in Sidebar works only if Bing is the search engine in Microsoft Edge. You can verify that this is the case by opening the Search management page in the Microsoft Edge browser: edge://settings/search. You need to make sure that Bing is the selected search engine under "search engine used in the address bar". Note that you need to restart the Microsoft Edge browser when you have changed the search engine back to Bing.

 

 

You will notice a new option in the right-click context menu of text selections in the browser. Select "Search in Sidebar for" from the context menu to use the new search feature.

 

A sidebar is opened automatically when you make the selection; it displays the search results for the selection in the sidebar. The default list displays the full search results but you may switch to Image or Video results only using the interface.

 

A search field is displayed as well to modify the search term to run different searches in the sidebar.

Closing Words

The main benefit of Edge's new Search in Sidebar feature is that users can keep a website open in the browser and display search results at the same time in the same tab. Something similarly can be achieved with different means as well, e.g. by displaying two browser windows side by side, using Vivaldi's tab tiling functionality, or add-ons like Search in Sidebar for Firefox.

 

Downside to Microsoft's native integration of the feature is that it is restricted to the company's own Bing search engine.

 

 

First look at Microsoft Edge's Search in Sidebar feature