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Bing Visual Search

Martin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:00:42 +0000

One of the new improvements that Microsoft introduces in their search engine Bing is a Silverlight driven visual search engine. Visual search meaning that pictures will be used to display and navigate the search results instead of text and text links. The benefit is a better search experiment with the limitation that it only works for specific topics and not every search. Microsoft has created roughly 30 different visual search niches in the categories entertainment, famous people, reference, shopping and sports. The shopping category contains the visual search topics cell phones, digital cameras, new cars, handbags and HDTVs.

A click on any topic will open the results in an image grid. The results are automatically sorted. The cell phone results page for instance sorts the different cell phones by brand. Hovering over a cell phone will display a search term in the Bing search box; A click will perform a normal search in Bing for the search term.

Various sorting options are provided in a drop down menu at the top. Cell phones can for example be sorted by Bing popularity or contract price while the movies in theater can be sorted by release date, title, metacritic rating or weekend box office earnings.

The search engine will automatically sort the results without reloading the page. Bing’s visual search can be a comfortable way of exploring specific information. It is handy for Internet users who want to research specific topics like movies that are currently playing in cinema, popular books, top iPhone apps and dog breeds. This is especially a good solution for users who do not know where to look for this information. Internet veterans usually know the websites that they have to open to find the information that they are looking for.

Bing Visual Search (link) is an interesting concept but it is currently limited to a few dozen popular topics, probably to ensure that the quality of the results remains high. It is probably not going to be introduced on a larger scale in the near future.

Update:

Bing Visual Search is only available to visitors who are using the United States version of the search engine (maybe some others but that has not been tested). If another country is shown in the top right corner then a page not found error is displayed. To access visual search users need to change the country to United States.

Microsoft Will Upgrade Its Bing Search Engine This Fall

Martin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:08:08 +0000

Microsoft’s introduction of its Bing search engine has revived search engine competition it seems. Bing did receive some praise since its introduction and Google has since then reacted by offering search engine users a preview of their upcoming search engine technologies in the form of the sandboxed search engine Caffeine and a limited test run of Ajax powered search which is delivering search results faster to the user.

Twitter has been full of messages about Microsoft’s coming upgrade of their Bing search engine. Most messages suggest a release this fall with some suspecting a release as early as the coming week. Relatively few information are provided about the changes that Microsoft is introducing in Bing 2.0. Some noteworthy ones are:

Silverlight powered Bing 2.0 on its way this month?: That’s the message coming out of yesterdays annual company

BING 2.0 terrific !! watch out guys ! bing + silverlight in maps = amazing !! goodbye google

It has to be noted that the tweets are coming out of Microsoft’s company meeting which suggest that most original information are provided by Microsoft employees. Microsoft on the other hand did not officially comment on the messages that have been posted.

It is also unknown if the search result quality has been improved as well or if only selected modules of the search engine have been optimized and improved. Guess we have to wait at least another week before we know for sure. What would you like to see in the new version of the search engine?

Tags: bing, bing 2.0, bing update, microsoft, microsoft bing, search engine

Microsoft Page Hunt

Martin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 08:39:02 +0000

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is doing quite well in several search engine marketing studies. It could do better and one interesting idea that the Microsoft researchers had was to create a game that would help the search results to be better. The game is an experimental game that is currently available on the Microsoft Labs website.

It basically centers on the following idea: The quality of search engine results can be improved by adding a human factor into the equation. Page Hunt will display websites to its visitors who have to guess the search phrase that is used to find that specific page in Bing. Points are awarded if the website is in the top 5 of the search engine for that query.

The researchers on the other hand are able to learn from the data that the users enter. They can use both positive and negative hits to improve the quality of Bing search results. Websites that are displayed to users range from commercial websites to those that promote open source software like Open Office. It is however sometimes quite difficulty to find the right search term to get the points.

Head over to Page Hunt if you want to play a little game and help Microsoft improve the quality of the Bing search results. Page Hunt requires Microsoft Silverlight.

Tags: bing, bing search, microsoft, microsoft bing, microsoft page hunt, page hunt, search engine

Bing Downloader

Martin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:39:10 +0000

You might want to try out Bing Downloader if you are a huge fan of the Microsoft search engine Bing or enjoy looking at the wallpapers that get posted as background images every day. Microsoft has made the deliberate decision to add a background image to their search engine by default. Most likely to look different than their greatest foe Google Search. Some users have expressed the desire to download these background images to use them on their computer systems.

It is possible to download the Bing background image manually. How it is done depends on the web browser used. Firefox users can for example simply right-click on the image and select View Background Image to view the image in a new tab from where it can be saved to the computer system.

Bing Downloader has been designed to automate the process. All it does is to display and download the latest Bing background image. There are no advanced options available like downloading previous background images. All the user needs to do is to run it once per day to download that day’s background image to the computer.

The background images usually have a size of 958×512 which makes them not suitable as wallpapers for computer systems with large computer monitors unless the user decides to center the wallpaper. Bing Downloader is a free 10K download. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5.

Update: Bing seems to use different background images as can be verified at the Bing Image Archive.

Tags: bing, bing background image, bing downloader, microsoft .net framework 3.5, microsoft bing, portable software, search engine, windows software

Search Bing And Google Simultaneously

Martin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:58:44 +0000

A great way of testing a new search engine is to compare it to the dominant established search engine. BingAndGoogle offers a combined search interface that is more comfortable than working with two web browser windows or switching between tabs in the same window.

The search engine mashup displays a single search form on the main page. It will perform searches on both Bing and Google and display the results in two columns on the same page with the Microsoft Bing search engine on the left and the Google search engine on the right. This makes it easier to work with both search engines and compare results in the same window.

The service displays its search form on the top of the screen so that users can perform additional searches on both search engines right away. It is furthermore possible to use a search form in one of the columns to search in one search engine exclusively. The search for web browser that is shown in the image above shows that both search engines list Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome (Google Browser), Safari and Flock on the main page. Google links to the Maxthon web browser additionally while Microsoft to the defunct Netscape browser. Funny though that both are not linking to Internet Explorer on their first results page.

Both columns offer the full functionality offered by the search engine including image and video search. Bing And Google offers an easy to use mashup that delivers results from both Bing and Google making it extremely convenient to work with and compare both search engines.

Tags: bing, bing and google, Google, google search, microsoft bing, search, Search Engines

Microsoft Bing Search Is Live

Martin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:17:54 +0000

Microsoft’s new search engine has created some buzz since its introduction a few days earlier. The search engine is now live for everyone to test. It has to be noted that Microsoft seems to have it optimized for English speaking users from the United States and the United Kingdom who get more functionality than someone from Germany or France.

Users from the United States get on-page previews of the contents of each site by hovering the mouse cursor over a search result while users from unsupported countries do not get these previews. The previews can contain up to five links to other content of the site which is an interesting feature as search engines usually limit the exposure to one or two links to a site on each page. Many aspects of Bing look like Google Search. There are sponsored advertisements on top of the search results pages and on the left. Bing will also add related content like images where appropriate to the results.

Bing categorizes search results where appropriate. A search for New York will start with all results on the top and display categories like maps, weather, travel or attractions below each with a handful of search results. This is actually an interesting concept as it might aid inexperienced users in their search. Experienced users on the other hand will perform targeted searches to find the information they are looking for.

Bing will display the categories, related searches and the search history on the left. The image search of Bing displays image results on an infinite scrolling page with options to filter images by size, layout, color, style or people. A virtual map can be displayed which is really interesting for location based searches. It will for instance link pictures to locations on the map.

Bing Video search makes it possible to play videos directly on the results page. This can be done by hovering the mouse over a video or by clicking on the play button that appears when hovering over the video. Videos can also be filtered by length, resolution, screen size or source.

Bing offers some comfort function and elements that users will not find using Google Search. It seems to be targeting English speaking users only at this point as they can access features that users from non-English speaking countries cannot (unless they change their country to USA or UK). Everything on the other hand comes down to the quality of the search results. Bing seems to have improved over Windows Live, especially for popular search terms.

Tags: bin search, bing, google search, microsoft, microsoft bing, microsoft search, search engine, windows search

Microsoft Bing

Martin — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:22:26 +0000

Every computer blog seems to have written an article about Microsoft Bing, the new Microsoft search engine that was formerly known as Kumo. No one except for Microsoft employees and probably a few partners have actually tested the search engine yet which makes it impossible to give it a first rating.

Microsoft surely has the work power and knowledge to create a search engine that could even the field. Bing however seems to be different from what people expected when they first heard about the new search engine. A short presentation video that has been published today gives a glimpse of the interface and functionality of the search engine.

The video concentrates on business, shopping, travel and health all very profitable niches but reveals little information about the aspects of the search engine that interest most users. The quality of the results can only be measured in tests once the search engine is accessible. The integrated features look interesting but might only appeal to a minority of users online.

We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster.

And features like cashback, where we actually give you money back on great products, and Price Predictor, which actually tells you when to buy an airline ticket in order to help get you the best price — help you make smarter decisions, and put money back in your pocket.

The Bing search engine is said to go live in the coming days.

Tags: bing, bing search, kumo, microsoft bing, microsoft search, search engine

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