Microsoft Bing Search Is Live
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.
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quality information. thanks for updates
Users are very unlikely to ditch the Google brand for a few bells and whistles that Microsoft provides through Bing.
I have to say that Microsoft is doing a smart move by launching Bing. If you look at it from the pure business perspective, MS knows that the days of the operating system and office software are coming to an end. Everything is moving towards the cloud. As we move in this direction, MS’s revenues will continue to shrink. They are simply looking for a new revenue stream which will (they hope) replace the waning OS and Office revenues in the future.
As for the search engine itself, again I have to give Kudos to MS. Don’t get me wrong, I personally dislike MS very very much. But I have to give them credit where credit is due. They are attempting to steal the most important part of Google’s business away from them: namely the shopping business. Imagine if tomorrow everyone started using bing to shop, compare prices, book travel tickets, etc. Which advertisers would then go to Google? All the ad dollars would shift from Google to MS. And seeing as 99% of Google’s revenues are derived from ads, they are the biggest losers if Microsoft succeeds with their latest venture.
So first MSN became Live, but now Bing is live, i man Live is Bing, I mean MSN changed to Bing, which is now live…
Now , LIVE is gone.
First impressions are ok, I never thought MSN search was very poor though, just not as good google. Image search, on the other hand, via MSN itself (and even Yahoo) gives relevant or ‘correct’ ones far deeper into the search results than google in almost 100% of my experience.
I have tried it a few times and its ok, to be honest it seems that all search engines are about the same, each one has its own things I like but for the most part I use google and yahoo. I will though try this one out for a while before I say one way or another as to if I like it or not.
I’ve just posted a greasemonkey addon that gives twitter search results alongside bing as well as cutting down some of the ads.
see: http://blog.mikedavidsmith.com/?p=99
The results still don’t seem as relevent as google’s.