• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 8, 2015

A search tool created by Microsoft Bing aimed at helping people gain a better understanding of the presidential candidates and their ideologies couldn't come soon enough.

Beginning Tuesday, when someone searches for election-related queries on Bing, they will first see the new Bing Election Experience, a tool that makes it simple to determine a candidate's positions on a variety of issues.

The tool relies on bar charts to show the candidate's conservative or progressive views. Users can scroll through to view the top news stories and tweets of the day about a given candidate and topic, as well as a 30-day view of their top news moments for the month.

The search results filter the data and news coverage, allowing searchers to compare candidates, public sentiment and personal views.

The new tool was built by the Bing Predicts team by crunching and combining terabytes of search and social data, with expert candidate analysis from Ontheissues.org, through machine-learning models. BPI assigns a candidate score and a public score for 10 of the key issues that shape the 2016 election cycle: education, environmental issues, tax reform, abortion, gun control, immigration reform, drug policy, LGBT rights, healthcare and Social Security, writes Ryan Gavin, GM of search for Microsoft Bing.

The idea is to have background on candidates at your fingertips, including their political life and overview of campaign and professional information.

Candidate profiles provide data on individual candidates and how they stack up on the issues, personal and professional information, as well as major campaign milestones. The system also serves up interactive analysis on spiking conversations from Twitter for each candidate.

For those who want to know which candidates are most aligned to a specific topic and political view, searchers can take the My BPI survey themselves. The survey, developed by Ontheissues.org, allows people to see how their position aligns with the issues compare with each candidate.

Bing aims to ease the complexities and make the nuanced political issues easier to understand. Gavin says the BPI score is not collected by Microsoft or hosted on its servers. The score never leaves the viewer's computers. Deleting responses completely removed the data from the computer. It basically shows the person using the BPI the candidates that have the closest view to your own.

Bing also makes available a debate or a primary timeline that includes past general election milestones and provides a calendar of future election events.