The History and Evolution of the Bing Homepage Quiz

IntroductionA Quiz That Started With a View

Most search engines welcome you with an empty box. Bing has always welcomed people with a picture: a fjord at first light, a heron frozen mid-strike, lanterns drifting down a river. For roughly a decade it has also welcomed them with a quiet challenge to prove how much they know about that picture.

The Bing Homepage Quiz feels so ordinary today that it is easy to forget it began as an experiment. Its roots reach back to a design decision Microsoft made in 2009. It borrowed ideas from a string of loyalty programs, lived through several rebrands, and kept its place on a homepage that now also hosts an AI assistant.

This guide follows that entire journey, from the first daily photograph to the quiz you can play today, and then looks at why a few multiple-choice questions turned into one of the stickiest habits on the web.

OverviewThe Timeline at a Glance

If you only have a minute, these are the moments that shaped the quiz. Highlighted dots mark the turning points.

1. Oct 2008 – Apr 2009SearchPerks! lets Live Search users collect tickets toward prizes, an early test of paying people to search.
2. June 2009Bing replaces Live Search, and a new full-screen homepage photo every day becomes its signature.
3. 2009 – 2015Hotspots on the daily image reveal short facts when hovered over or tapped.
4. September 2010Bing Rewards launches, giving credits for searches and promotions.
5. Late May 2016Homepage trivia replaces hotspots: a graduation-cap icon opens a three-question quiz about the image.
6. June 2016Bing reports a 65%+ jump in engagement versus hotspots and highlights its Friday weekly trends quiz and homepage polls.
7. August 2016Bing Rewards becomes Microsoft Rewards; credits turn into points.
8. Late 2010sQuizzes settle in as regular Rewards daily activities, turning the feature into a routine.
9. October 2020Bing is renamed Microsoft Bing and gets a new logo.
10. 2023 – 2024Bing Chat (later Copilot) arrives, and Microsoft Start returns to the MSN name in late 2024.
11. 2025 – 2026The daily quiz lives beneath the search box alongside the image; Rewards moves to Member, Silver and Gold tiers in 2026.

2009A Search Engine That Led With a Picture

Bing officially took over from Live Search in June 2009, with June 3 being the date most often cited. Microsoft's search product had already worn several names by then (MSN Search, Windows Live Search, Live Search) and it needed an identity that felt unmistakably different from Google's plain white page.

Microsoft's answer was visual. Instead of a blank canvas, Bing opened on a large, high-quality photograph that changed every day: landscapes, wildlife, architecture, festivals and moments from history.

That choice is the foundation everything else rests on. A new image every morning quietly plants a new question in the visitor's head: Where is that? What animal is that? Why this picture today? Bing placed curiosity right where people begin searching, and curiosity is exactly the fuel trivia runs on.

Long before there was a quiz, there was a question in every visitor's mind. The photo asked it; the quiz would eventually just write it down.

The images developed a following of their own. Enthusiasts began cataloguing them year by year, and "the Bing wallpaper" became a small cultural object that people collected, set as desktop backgrounds and shared.

2009 – 2015Hotspots: The First Taste of Trivia

Before any questions appeared, the homepage used hotspots: small markers layered on top of the photograph. Hover over or tap one and a brief fact appeared, such as the name of a peak, the story behind a bridge, or a note about the creature in frame. By late 2010, Microsoft was describing four hotspots per image, along with controls for flipping back through the previous week of photos.

Hotspots were deliberately gentle. There was no score, no right or wrong, nothing to complete. That was both their charm and their limit. Curious visitors loved them, but everyone else had little reason to engage, and information only flowed one way: Bing told you something, and nothing asked you to recall it.

2008 – 2016The Parallel Thread: Early Rewards Programs

While the homepage evolved, Microsoft was running a separate experiment about motivation. In October 2008, before the Bing name even existed, Live Search SearchPerks! let people earn tickets toward prizes simply by searching. It shut down in April 2009, and a cashback scheme called Bing Cashback also came and went.

In September 2010, Microsoft launched Bing Rewards, which handed out credits for regular searches and special promotions that could be redeemed for gift cards, electronics, sweepstakes entries and donations. It initially required the Bing Bar add-on for Internet Explorer and later worked in any desktop browser.

These programs taught Microsoft an important lesson: small, regular incentives can reshape daily habits. When the homepage quiz arrived six years later, that lesson was ready and waiting.

Late May 2016The Graduation Cap Arrives

In late May 2016, the Bing team made what it described as one of the most significant homepage changes since launch: hotspots were retired and replaced with homepage trivia. This is the true birthday of the Bing Homepage Quiz.

How the original quiz worked

• A graduation-cap icon appeared on the homepage image.
• Hovering over it revealed the first question about the image of the day.
• Picking an answer opened a search results page for the correct answer, with the quiz sitting at the top alongside extra background on the topic.
• After three questions, you received a score you could share on social media, and you could keep playing quizzes from earlier days.

Look closely at the third point, because it reveals the genius of the design: every answer was also a search. The quiz didn't just entertain. It turned idle curiosity into real search sessions, which is exactly what a search engine wants.

Hotspots vs. the 2016 homepage quiz

2016 onwardThe Weekly Quiz and Homepage Polls

Homepage trivia did not launch alone. In the same mid-2016 update, Bing spotlighted a weekly trends quiz that appeared every Friday in the Popular Now carousel, the row of tiles along the bottom of the homepage, as well as homepage polls inviting visitors to vote on topical questions.

Bing explained the reasoning openly: quizzes and polls had been among the most-shared kinds of content on Facebook in 2015, and its experiments showed that a blend of serious headlines and lighter, quirkier stories produced the best news quiz.

From this point, the Bing quiz family split into two branches that still exist today:

The weekly edition proved durable. As recently as mid-2025, guides described a Bing weekly quiz of roughly seven questions opened from the homepage carousel and refreshed on Fridays, though Microsoft has never promised a fixed format or schedule. If current events are more your speed, you can warm up with the bing news quiz today.

2016 – 2019Microsoft Rewards and the Daily Habit

Only a few months after trivia launched, in August 2016, Bing Rewards was rebranded as Microsoft Rewards. Credits became points, membership was simplified into Level 1 and Level 2, and the program stretched beyond search to include the Microsoft Store, Xbox and the Edge browser.

Over the following years, quizzes became a fixture among the program's daily activities, often grouped as a "Daily Set" alongside polls and quick-fire formats such as This or That. For many people this is where the quiz changed from a curiosity into a ritual: glance at the photo, answer the questions, collect a few points, and come back tomorrow.

This period also gave rise to a whole ecosystem of fan sites, practice quizzes and study guides, which is perhaps the clearest sign of how deeply the habit had taken root.

2020 – 2024New Names, New Layouts, Same Ritual

The next chapter was defined less by changes to the quiz than by changes around it.

• October 2020: Bing became Microsoft Bing, complete with a new logo.
• February 2023: Bing Chat launched (it was later renamed Copilot), and the homepage started sharing space with conversational AI.
• November 2024: Microsoft Start was folded back into the MSN brand, reshuffling where Microsoft's news content lived.

Through all of it, the pairing of image and quiz survived. What moved was the doorway: over the years the quiz has been reached through a graduation cap, a "Q"-style icon, cards and carousel tiles as the homepage layout shifted. The core idea stayed put.

2025 – 2026The Bing Homepage Quiz Today

Microsoft's current help guidance ties the daily quiz to the homepage image: you find it beneath the search box, open it through the image's headline or credit, and use arrow controls to browse the previous seven days. The number of questions can vary, so while the original version had three, it's best not to assume a fixed count. Meanwhile, Microsoft Rewards introduced a three-tier system (Member, Silver and Gold) in 2026.

What has not changed is the loop established back in 2016: a striking image, a short set of questions, instant feedback, and something new tomorrow.

AnalysisWhy the Format Has Lasted

Plenty of homepage features have come and gone since 2009. The quiz has outlived most of them, and six design ideas explain why.

PracticalHow to Get More Out of Every Quiz

• Read the image caption first. The questions almost always orbit the photo's subject, so its headline is your best clue.
• Treat wrong answers as the good part. The explanation after a miss is where most of the learning happens.
• Use the archive. Step back through recent days to catch quizzes you missed while traveling or busy.
• Sign in if you care about points. Rewards credit requires a Microsoft account, and availability differs by region.
• Play fair. Bots, scripts and VPN tricks can get a Rewards account suspended, and they defeat the point of learning anyway.
• Make it a ritual. Pair the quiz with your morning coffee; consistency beats cramming for long-term recall.

Wrapping upFinal Thoughts

The Bing Homepage Quiz is a small feature with a surprisingly long family tree. A photograph chosen to stand out from a sea of blank search pages. Hotspots that tested whether people would engage with it. A series of loyalty programs that uncovered what keeps people coming back. And a 2016 redesign that turned passive facts into active questions.

Names changed, layouts shifted and AI moved onto the same page, yet the daily ritual endured. That's because it rests on something no redesign can remove: the simple pleasure of looking at something beautiful and wanting to know more about it.