Why Bing Video Search is better than YouTube Search

Martin Brinkmann
Jun 3, 2017
Internet, Search
|
33

You have a lot of options when it comes to watching videos on your devices. Most users seem to use YouTube more or less exclusively for all their family friendly video needs, but sites like Vimeo or Dailymotion are popular as well.

Search on YouTube, with YouTube being a Google property, should be one of the strong features of the video streaming site, but it is not really.

While it works, and even lets you filter by upload date and some additional features, it is nowhere near where it could be. It has no preview feature for instance, and while you can add it using extensions, something like it should be built-in in my opinion.

I run all my video searches on Bing Video Search instead, and have two core reasons for that which I would like to explain in detail in the coming paragraphs.

Note: I understand that the comparison between a single-site search engine (YouTube), and a multi-site search engine is not entirely fair. Google's own Video Search seems to focus heavily on YouTube as well however.

Bing Video Search

bing video search

Bing Video Search is a feature of Microsoft's search engine Bing. While I don't use Bing at all for Web searches, as I find the search engine lacking in that regard -- especially for non-English queries -- I find some of Bing's other features quite useful and often superior to Google's offerings.

You can use the following URL as your entry point to run video searches on Bing: https://www.bing.com/videos/

Simply enter the term you are interested in, and wait for Bing to return results to you. Results are listed with thumbnails, the source site they are hosted on, and information on views, play time, uploader, upload date and title.

While most videos may be hosted on YouTube, you may get results from other sites such as Vimeo, Youku, VM, and lots of other video hosting sites as well. This depends largely on your query. This is the first advantage that Bing Video Search offers over YouTube's or Google Video's own search function.

Sites like Vimeo host exclusive content for instance sometimes. A search on YouTube won't find those videos, while a search on Bing will.

The second feature that makes Bing Video Search superior in my opinion is its preview feature. You can hover over any video on Bing Video Search to get a preview of the video. This preview includes sound, and is a great way to quickly determine a video's quality, and whether it matches what you are looking for.

These two features are not the only ones that Bing offers. Here is a short list of other features that you may find interesting:

  • Better filters: You can sort by date, length or resolution, or filter by a specific source.
  • If you turn off SafeSearch, you will get NSFW results.
  • Save videos to your Microsoft Account, and get personalized feeds based on your savings and activity.

Closing Words

Bing Video Search is a handy multi-site search engine for videos that returns both family friendly and NSFW results based on SafeSearch settings. Its preview feature is the feature that I like the most, as it does away with the "opening video > realizing it is not what I was looking for > going back"  workflow on YouTube.

Now You: Which video search engine do you use, and why?

Summary
Why Bing Video Search is better than YouTube Search
Article Name
Why Bing Video Search is better than YouTube Search
Description
This article discusses why Bing Video Search is superior to YouTube Search, or Google Video Search when it comes to finding videos.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. Dwight Stegall said on June 19, 2017 at 11:46 am
    Reply

    I search the web with Google. But I like Bing Video and Images searches better.

  2. ramsam said on June 8, 2017 at 11:19 am
    Reply

    I love Martin Brinkmann for this blog and let us not offend him.
    Actually, we must join hands to buy him a yacht in the Carribean for this wonderful blog
    ( I enjoyed his comment of yacht in the Carribean, taking it sportively)

    And, definitely I have started using Bing now for video search

    1. Tom Hawack said on June 8, 2017 at 11:26 am
      Reply

      Maybe was it only a sailboat after all, lol :)

      1. Tom Hawack said on June 15, 2017 at 7:58 pm
        Reply

        @anonzy, better late than never! This sub-story seems already so old… ’twas only a week ago. Time flies :)
        Somebody started the joke and there we are, keeping it alive! In this world of serious business, traumatizing Internet, good to have a totally off-topic more or less discreet laugh. LOL!

      2. anonzy said on June 15, 2017 at 7:18 pm
        Reply

        Of course it’s a sailboat. Who’s going to pay for all the gas?

  3. Tim said on June 3, 2017 at 7:15 pm
    Reply

    “…If you turn off SafeSearch, you will get NSFW results.”

    That’s one area where Bing really excels. :)

  4. jasray said on June 3, 2017 at 5:38 pm
    Reply

    Of course–click, search, “Oh, I might like that.” Click–

    “Harry Styles – Sign of the Times”

    “This video contains content from VEVO. It is restricted from playback on certain sites or applications. Watch on YouTube”

    Why would I want to use Bing’s Video Search? When I search for something and it is listed, I make the assumption that the search is valid and the link to the content is valid. I don’t expect a link from the search to offer me a UK link that Bing already knows won’t play in the US.

    A real drip of golden honey.

  5. Pants said on June 3, 2017 at 3:35 pm
    Reply

    It smells like it is a sponsored article from MS.

    1. flyli5411 said on June 3, 2017 at 9:47 pm
      Reply

      IDIOT COMMENT TO MAKE It smells like it is a sponsored article from MS.
      TROLL

    2. Tom Hawack said on June 3, 2017 at 8:49 pm
      Reply

      “Imagination is funny, makes a cloudy day sunny, makes a bee think of honey just as I think of you…” would sing Dean Martin.

      Imagination.
      If you take a large group which you know dislikes for the most part a person, a company, an institution and you’d like them to start bashing because from your point of view they’ve sort of forgot doing so, the best way is to evoke that person, company, institution in flattering terms : you can be quite sure that will trigger your audience’s minds, wake them up and have them put that extra layer of bashing which was missing, without yourself being considered as the “pusher”.

      Therefor, this article, with imagination, could as well have been sponsored by, say, Google, just to remind users how much they dislike a company and for those who like it how many others just don’t, to put il extra-mildly!

      Finally, the simple hypothesis of an article written freely, based on an experience which would appear as a good opportunity to remind us all that nothing, no one is totally bad (nor good) remains plausible :)

    3. Martin Brinkmann said on June 3, 2017 at 3:44 pm
      Reply

      Yes, Microsoft just bought me a new Yacht in the Caribbean. Thought I could keep this a secret..

      1. RG said on June 3, 2017 at 8:06 pm
        Reply

        Everybody who leaves a positive comment about Bing gets one too.

  6. chesscanoe said on June 3, 2017 at 2:41 pm
    Reply

    If I do a Bing video search on Chrome or Edge for “euler characteristic” and hover the mouse over some thumbnails, I get “No preview available”, even in Incognito Mode where no extensions are operative. Anyone figure out why this happens?

  7. Richard Allen said on June 3, 2017 at 1:43 pm
    Reply

    Thanks Martin! I had no idea that MS had really stepped up their game with Bing. Has some nice search filters and… video preview also? I hope Google is paying attention. It’s refreshing to see MS putting out a product/service that I want to use! Now if I could only get them to quit trying to stab me in the back with Win7 updates ‘my’ world would be easier. :)

    Screenshot of Bing video search filter. Userstyle is Dark Bing.
    https://s3.postimg.org/mf7h3e8mr/Bing_Video_Search.png

  8. Yuliya said on June 3, 2017 at 12:01 pm
    Reply

    Minus the audio preview, which it lacks, I think Yandex is better. UI is a lot better and lighter, also the video on the right keeps playing just fine while you can perform different searches.
    [https://i.imgur.com/dyNkU0K.jpg]

    It is amasing how YouTube does not have any form of preview in this day and age though.

  9. Tom Hawack said on June 3, 2017 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    “Microsoft to pay users if they search with Bing” (In Britain)
    http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/microsoft-to-pay-users-if-they-search-with-bing/articleshow/58941261.cms

    Well, if Bing Video is that good I wouldn’t charge a penny should I connect from U.K. :)

    1. RichH said on June 3, 2017 at 6:13 pm
      Reply

      Bing has been allowing US users to earn Amazon cash rewards for ages. Besides the fact that I don’t like Google’s search appearance for most things, I have been getting $5 every six weeks from Bing toward Amazon for years.

      More importantly, the article is correct for any kind of video searching as well as most picture searching. Bing is far superior to anything Google has to offer in these areas.

  10. ram sam said on June 3, 2017 at 11:19 am
    Reply

    Normally I dont prefer bing, but this seems interesting. I will give it a try and share my opinions later

  11. Jeff said on June 3, 2017 at 9:50 am
    Reply

    With all due respect, I disagree. YouTube’s filters are its killer feature. Duration/length filter, upload date and sorting make finding the right video very easy.

    1. Dorn said on June 4, 2017 at 2:15 pm
      Reply

      A preview-with-sound on hover feature is hugely lacking though.

      However, I’m not giving out my search trends to Microsoft. They already have one of my big emails from the era before ProtonMail, I don’t want them to cross data.

      YouTube has way too much data as well but there’s not much of a choice here, so… Though to be honest, videos on Youtube can be found on Dailymotion too, it’s just that people insist on picking and spreading the Youtube link all the time. Makes it hard to switch to Dailymotion.

      1. Tom Hawack said on June 4, 2017 at 3:01 pm
        Reply

        I agree concerning users fascination for YouTube when other video sites are available, DailyMotion of course, Vimeo as well though perhaps the latter more sophisticated (in the good sens of the word).

        Concerning DailyMotion, it’s nice but you definitely won’t find as much as you do on YouTube. The site also seems obsessed with ads to the point that pre-video advertisement is inevitable unless blocked in either of the following ways, and that is a policy I don’t understand when that of a site which is loosing users day by day because mainly of YouTube : being extra-zealous with ads when theses are easily avoidable on YouTube is rather stupid IMO, not to mention that DailyMotion could work on a more attractive interface.

        Two ways I know to skip the in-video DailyMotion ads :

        1- If using ‘uBlock Origin’ add to the ‘My filters’ section a dedicated uBO filter : @@dailymotion.com##script:inject(1136.js)

        2- Use a script called ‘Dailymotion Raw Html5 Player’ available at GreasyFork

        I use the script because it ads many features to the simple fact of avoiding in-video ads, but I remember that before that uBlockO’ filter made it nicely. I hope it still works because DailyMotion has spent a lot of time trying to defeat those in-video ad-blockers and may have changed their code, again, since. You don’t bother people with unavoidable in-video users when your site is falling : a truly immature attitude. They already have the site ads, why ad ads to ads? Gosh!

        I do visit DailyMotion, and Vimeo, especially when no particular search in mind. Should DailyMotion reconsider its in-video advertisement that they could possibly increase their audience. Pity, it’s otherwise a nice place, even if they could redesign it.

    2. zero said on June 3, 2017 at 1:13 pm
      Reply

      You can see the filter button on the screenshot in the article.

      1. Jeff said on June 3, 2017 at 6:53 pm
        Reply

        Ah I was using Opera where Bing DOES NOT show any filters! Got them in Chrome.

    3. jupe said on June 3, 2017 at 10:35 am
      Reply

      you can filter the Bing results too, in the top right there is a filter link.

      1. Jeff said on June 3, 2017 at 12:24 pm
        Reply

        Screenshot? I don’t think it’s there for videos, only for web results.

  12. Fena said on June 3, 2017 at 8:14 am
    Reply

    Never used before so gave it a try. First search over 150 showed up and only one was NOT youtube ?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on June 3, 2017 at 8:17 am
      Reply

      Results depend largely on the search term. YouTube results are dominant in most areas because YouTube is home to the majority of videos on this planet.

  13. Rick A. said on June 3, 2017 at 8:14 am
    Reply

    The clean URL is https://www.bing.com/videos/explore

    i like it but it causes slow down in my browser.

    Too bad this article will probably get little hits.

    1. Jacks said on June 3, 2017 at 8:08 pm
      Reply

      What are you using a Intel Celeron processor from 2001 and 64MB GPU? That page is smooth on all my devices.

      1. Rick A. said on June 5, 2017 at 3:11 pm
        Reply

        @Jacks – No, but i did figure out the problem as i failed to remember the laptop i was on has a couple shitty drivers. i went back to https://www.bing.com/videos/explore after your reply and was going to use about:performance to see if an add-on was causing the problem, the website was working fine then i remembered about my touchpad driver being shit. Once in a while it will scroll like shit and mimic browser slow down until i close and re-open my browser, sometimes it will be okay after a short without closing and reopening the browser, but there’s nothing i can do about it, luckily it doesn’t happen to often. i have to use the Synaptics touchpad driver on the manufactures website because Windows 10 won’t recognize the alps touchpad driver from the manufactures website and will install the newest Windows 10 Synaptics driver over top of it, and if i use that driver if and i accidentally hit the button that turns off the touchpad and hit it again the touchpad won’t turn back on, the only way to fix it is either restarting Windows or putting the laptop to sleep and waking it multiple times until it finally re-enables. My video/gpu driver was shit and giving me problems when i played videos on Windows 7 but amazingly it doesn’t no more since i upgraded to Windows 10 and it’s the same exact driver.

    2. Richard Allen said on June 3, 2017 at 2:56 pm
      Reply

      Just tried the same video search on Chrome x64, Pale Moon x86, FF ESR x64, Nightly x64 and the latest Vivaldi x64 snapshot and they all worked fine, for me. I’ve been using Nightly this morning and was very surprised when it put a major beat down on Chrome when scrolling the page. Scrolling the video search results was very smooth in Nightly but choppy in Chrome and I will be the first to admit that Chrome is generally a performance beast. I’ve noticed in the past that Chrome doesn’t load the GPU as hard as FF and Nightly on my system, that could explain some of the difference in scrolling performance. Also, with Pale Moon, FF and Nightly I have changed two about:config entries:
      mousewheel.acceleration.start=3
      mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount=3
      Makes a Big difference on my computers.
      Vivaldi had the 2nd best scrolling performance, for me, it’s not bashful about loading up the GPU on graphics heavy pages. I’m using Win7 Pro.

    3. chesscanoe said on June 3, 2017 at 1:37 pm
      Reply

      I don’t do much searching for videos, but on Windows 10 CU using latest Chrome beta on your URL causes no slowdown for me, and the preview function is really useful – a big thanks to Martin.

      1. Rick A. said on June 3, 2017 at 4:01 pm
        Reply

        Yeah, the slowdown is because of my browser or maybe an extension.

        With the URL if you use the one in the article https://www.bing.com/videos/ it immediately changes to https://www.bing.com/videos/explore?FORM=RECMVI but if you use https://www.bing.com/videos/explore it stays that way and is what i call a clean URL. That’s what i would bookmark. i never bookmark sites with “ref” and similar, i always clean the URL’s first.

        Yeah that preview feature is nice. i know that there’s an extension for Scroogle Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-preview/hmggjocpafbpjdhoknaneokaklekakeh that shows images when you hover over the thumbnails on YouTube but i found a better one for Firefox that actually plays the video and sound when you hover over the thumbnail, and it’s a web extension – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yt-video-thumbs/ – Now i use another web extension Magic Actions For YouTube – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/magic-actions-for-youtube/ – and in that extension if i have the day/night feature enabled and the light switch flipped which makes YouTube dark, the thumbnail preview only plays sound and no video. Hopefully a future update for one of the extensions fixes this. Also i checked in about:performance and both extensions don’t cause any performance issue at all. i recommend them.

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