Microsoft Bing

Any blog and tech site seems to have published 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 rate it properly.

Microsoft surely has the work force and knowledge to create a search engine that could even the field and be a competitor of Google Search, the dominating search engine of the Internet.

Bing

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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

Bing review

Bing has been available for more than 2 years now, and while Microsoft managed to become the second biggest search engine in the world right after Google Search, it failed to close the gap to Google Search in most countries of the world where the latter is still dominating the search market.

Bing Search displays a new wallpaper image every day on its start page which is nice but not something that search engine users may need or want. English searches for the most part are quite good and display results that you would expect.

Bing displays information about selected queries in a sidebar on the search results page which is a feature that is similar to Google's Knowledge Graph that the company introduced some time ago.

Microsoft displays related searches on search results pages that visitors of the search engine can click on to refine their searches.

The image search engine is quite good as it displays all results on an endless scrolling page. Here you also get related topics that you can click on and filters to narrow down results by size, color, type, layout or people.

Bing Videos too is excellent as it lets you watch many videos right on Bing and because it includes previews of any video listed by Bing.

Closing Words

Bing all in all does a good job if you are searching in English. Localized results on the other hand are not on pair with Google's offerings, and that's likely the prime reason why Bing has troubles getting market share in non-English speaking countries.

Video and image search are two of Bing's strongest features as they offer functionality that Google does not support. Especially the option to preview videos by hovering the mouse over them needs to be mentioned in this regard as it is a useful feature to quickly preview videos to decide whether to click on them to play them entirely or pass.

Advertisement