Microsoft has signed a partnership with Encyclopedia Britannica to include its reference work to Bing search engine. The company announced the deal this Thursday.

The partnership means people can now see Encyclopedia Britannica references on the search results of Bing. It's a part of the deal made with Encyclopedia Britannica. Bing users will now see details and a thumbnail image of item they are searching for. This decision of Britannica was built on its previous decision of stopping production of a print edition. Microsoft announced the partnership in a blogpost.

Bing users will also get to see reference information from other popular sources like Freebase, Quiki and Wikipedia. When users will make a search using Bing, they would see a small box displaying noticeable facts about a subject or topic from Britannica. People believe it's a great attempt made by Microsoft to match its search engine with Google.

"We're very excited to collaborate with Encyclopedia Britannica as it continues to strengthen its online presence," Salvetti mentioned in his blogpost. He believes Bing users will find the search engine more helpful now.

Google announced a similar feature to Bing of summary box in May. Search Engine Land's Matt McGee tried the new feature of Bing and said the encyclopedia results were not showing up on every search. There was a summary box by Britannica in search results but information from Encyclopedia was appearing ordinarily like other results with a link.

Bing is definitely trying to be a better search engine in this way. But Google is also thinking about taking a different approach that can make it even better in the search space in the next few months.