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Useful Tips To Get The Most Out Of Bing Search

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:25:26 +0000

I have been working with the Bing search engine for the last couple of days after switching to it from Google Search. It still takes time to get used to this new search engine after using Google for the last decade or so almost exclusively. I really do not want to say to much about the reasons for switching only that Google in my opinion has deteriorated from the perfect search engine to a cluttered monster that often failed to display the results that I wanted to find. That, and that they place scraper sites with my articles in front of my own site.

Bing it is now. It is the second most popular search engine in the US with Yahoo Search being third. The first thing that you notice when you use Bing is that they do not automatically focus the search form. That is a bummer if you have been using Google Search for that long.

A quick search on Bing forjump to form field automatically web browser revealed my own site as the number one result explaining how to automatically jump to a first text field. The same search on Google did not reveal the information needed on the first three pages and I stopped looking further after that disappointing result.

Focus First Textbox is a userscript that will automatically focus the first textbox (that is the search form on Bing) on many websites. The userscript is fully compatible with the Firefox web browser if Greasemonkey is installed. It is likely that it will also work fine in other compatible web browsers such as Google Chrome and Opera.

bing search results

google search results

This little helper can save lots of time especially if you use the search engine often throughout the day.

Using Bing with all features

Bing offers localized versions of their search to visitors outside the United States. These localized search engines often lack features that Bing for the United States offers. Bing displays the current localization at the top right corner. It may pay off to switch that to United States. If you do not do it you might miss out features like summary text which are described below.

bing localization

Several of the tips in this article require the usage of the United States version of Bing.

Making use of summary text

Bing displays a small excerpt for every search result. These information are usually taken from a site’s meta description tag which are often auto generated or not optimal. The summary text feature of Bing displays additional information about each search results.

Hover over a search results in Bing. Notice that a small arrow on the right side of the entry appears. The text summary will be displayed if you move the mouse over the arrow.

bing summary text

Making use of search history

Bing keeps track of the searches of a user in the search history. The history is displayed on the left side displaying the last searches conducted by the user. The See All link leads to all the searches conducted over the last 28 days which can be helpful to repeat a search done in that time.

search history

Search history can be cleared and turned off at any time in the same sidebar.

Bing offers additional neat features like video previews on the search result pages. Do you have tips that you would like to share with the rest? Let us know in the comments.

About search quality: Is Bing always displaying better results than Google? Nope, it is not. The current trend however suggests that Bing (and Yahoo as well) have increased their search relevancy and quality while Google’s deteriorated.

5 Advanced Bing Tips

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 20:33:03 +0000

The coverage of Microsoft’s new search engine Bing was quite extensive here on Ghacks but also on many other sites on the Internet. This is going to slow down in the future but we have two articles about Bing that we would like to publish in the coming days. The first deals with 5 advanced tips that showcase some interesting features that Bing is offering but also should make working with the search engine more comfortable.

1. Remove the Bing background image

Many users think that the background image that is shown on the Bing homepage is more of a distraction than anything else. There is however a very easy way of removing the background image in the search engine to work with a barebone version without the background image. All that needs to be done is to open the Bing homepage with the following parameter:

http://www.bing.com/?rb=0

This will make the homepage show up without the background image which gets rid of the noise and can save some Kilobytes of data transfer as well.

2. IP Address lookup

Bing can lookup any IP address using an advanced parameter and display a list of domains that are hosted on that IP address. The parameter to do that is the following:

IP:[IP Address]

Substitute [IP Address] with a valid IP. The query IP:207.46.104.147 would for example display a list of domains hosted on that IP address.

3. Every search is available as an RSS feed

Every search on Bing is also available as an RSS feed which can be very interesting for webmasters who want to monitor their position in the search engine. The web feed will be updated whenever changes in website rankings occur. The feeds can be accessed from the web browser’s toolbars or by pointing a feed reader to the result url and appending

&format=rss

To the results. A search for Windows 7 would be available as an RSS feed from the following url

http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+7&go=&qb=1&format=rss

4. The contains parameter

The parameter contains will tell the search engine to only look for websites that contain that search term. This can lead to some interesting searches when combined with other search phrases, some examples are:

Windows 7 contains:torrent
Madonna contains:mp3
Google contains:pdf

5. Display only wallpaper images

Bing’s image search has already received some praise in the past days. One interesting feature is the ability to display only wallpaper images in the image search results. This is done by searching for a term in Bing image search and clicking on the Size category in the left sidebar. It will automatically display various size filters including one called wallpaper. This will display only images that have the exact size of the computer screen resolution.