Today, Bing is announcing more refinements to its search engine. The most noticeable one is what Bing director Stefan Weitz unofficially calls the “Bing Box.” For popular search categories such as celebrities, cities, companies, musicians, movies, places, and sports, the top result will be the Bing Box, which will pull in an image and a link to the official site, along with some relevant data. For pop music star Lady Gaga, it might be concert dates and realtime Tweets. For “Miami Beach,” it might be a thumbnail of a map, the current weather, flight deals, and a list of neighborhoods.

The Bing Box is similar to Google’s Universal Search Onebox that pulls in images and results from different vertical search categories and places it at the top of the search results page. But the Bing Box packages the data in a slightly different manner. “That center search pane with a bunch of links is going to change,” predicts Weitz.

Bing wants to compete against Google with a better presentation of information and design of the user experience. In addition to the Bing Box, it is tweaking the guided search along the left-hand column. It is getting rid of the drill-down search categories which currently appear in the prime top-left location. Nobody was clicking on them. Instead, different types of filters and related searches will appear there. Weitz notes that related searches on Bing get a 16 percent click-through rate, and search history gets a 3 percent click-through rate. So those two are staying.

Underneath the search bar will be a new set of tabs appropriate to the search term. For a rock band, the tabs may include events, news, videos, and images. While a search for a place will bring up tabs for maps, events, news and the weather.

On Bing Maps, a new Foursquare app will show places where people have left comments and tips. Bing is also adding more eye-catching graphical elements to its autosuggest. So stock charts and weather icons will begin to appear in the drop-down list of suggestions once you start typing your search query. Weitz says that a whopping 30 percent of searches on Bing are already launched from the autosuggest feature. Separately, a comparison feature will start to be rolled out as well for sports teams, presenting side-by-side stats in search results.

Finally, Bing is creating a dedicated page for all automobile searches, much like it already does for events and recipes. The guided search on the left includes a breakdown by different trims, competitors, and model year. While the new tabs on top will include images, videos, and specs. Bing is building out more of these so-called domain task pages for different topics. Later this year, videogame searches will get their own special treatment, with shortcuts to find cheats, walkthroughs, and reviews.

“There isn’t another technology that is eight years old that you would be satisfied with,” says Weitz, referring to how little the search experience has changed since Google hit the scene and offered up its spare blue links. As the Web moves away from being mostly just text to images, video, and rich pools of data, he thinks there are better ways to present that information in a way that reduces the work and effort required of the user.

Web-based Twitter client Brizzly has three major developments to report: a new free iPhone app, a new Brizzly Guide (which gives trending topics on Twitter their own hub pages as permanent resources for information on the top Twitter discussion items over time), and the acquisition of WikiRank.

The Brizzly Guide is a user-editable area that fleshes out the backstory and adds contextual information to Twitter trends. Loading up the Guide shows the top 10 current trending topics at the left, and either a description of that topic or a prompt to be the first to explain the trend.

Taking cues from wiki-style user-editable sites like Wikipedia, the Brizzly Guide encourages users to curate the landing pages that will act as resources for current and past Twitter trends over time.

The free Brizzly iPhone app is available now in the App Store, featuring multiple account support, lists, photo uploads, saved searches syncing, classic-style retweet functionality, and support for the new Brizzly Guide with user-editable trends and news topics.

Further evidence of Brizzly’s adoption of wiki-style philosophy comes with the announcement of the company’s acquisition of Wikirank, an app that visualizes Wikipedia data and will soon, presumably, help visualize Brizzly data and build out a more robust Brizzly Guide. Wikirank displays popular and trending pages in a clean and easy-to-use interface. CEO Jason Shellen said of the acquisition, “We will be integrating Wikirank technology into the Brizzly Guide over the coming months,” so we should expect to see more from the Twitter client surrounding trending and data visualization in the near future.

Are you a Brizzly user? What do you currently use to monitor Twitter trends?