Have you taken at look at Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft yet? If so, you’ve probably noticed it has a lot of cool features to help you view and refine your search results. But did you know that some of the results are being powered by the data in Freebase?

For certain queries, Bing augments its standard search results with an answer box full of structured data from Freebase. For example, when we wrote this blog posting, a search for “twitter” gave you the following:

Similarly, searching for “Sergey Brin” gave you this:

It works for collections too. For example, check out what we got when we searched for “pablo picasso artworks”:

Nice!

Since Bing is constantly tweaking its algorithms, we don’t know what exact set of keywords will trigger Freebase queries in the future. But we’re definitely hoping to expand the coverage over time, and also to explore other ways in which Freebase data could be used to improve search. We think there are quite a few interesting things that could be done.

Congrats to the Bing team on a great launch!