Redmond, Washington-based software giant Microsoft is reportedly preparing to equip its Bing search engine with some new features.

According to a report published by WinRumors, Bing is internally testing live tiles on its home page to allow users to have a glimpse at news, weather, maps, trends and targeted apps.

The report also claims that live tiles are a part of Microsoft’s efforts to create an HTML 5 version of its Bing search engine.

Apart from live tiles and HTML 5 enhancements, the software giant is also reportedly preparing to introduce an instant search feature, similar to Google’s instant search feature that was launched last year.

Meanwhile, a different report by Conceivably Tech claims that Microsoft has gained a new patent, titled “Predicting and using search engine switching behavior,” which will enable the company to predict a possible change of search engine a user might be thinking of.

The new patent will make of results from a real time survey and allow the search engine to monitor its users’ actions and maintain a database with events which could potentially indicate a possible switch.

Commenting on the topic, Microsoft said, “The tool may submit the current query to a user’s preferred engine but when the tool detects that the user is going to switch, it may relay the same query to other engines previously specified.”

The changes may help Bing compete against big rival search engines more efficiently. Currently, Bing ranks third in the US with 14.4 per cent of search market share, lagging behind Google and Yahoo, which have 65.5 per cent and 15.9 per cent share, respectively.