Bing is Microsoft’s latest attempt to dislodge Google from it’s number one spot over the lucrative Internet search Market. The challenge it faces is competing against a service where to "Google it" has become synonymous in modern culture.
Although officially due for release on Wednesday (3rd June), the search engine became live this morning. Literally, with www.live.com redirecting to the new www.bing.com. And although the screenshots may vary from your experience of Bing, the features and functions should remain the same.
Read on after the jump
Here are some of the new features:
Video Previews
This is surprisingly handy. If you put in a search term such as TV Series Lost, at the top of the results displays a few thumbnails showing off screen caps off video sharing outlets such as YouTube and DailyMotion. Roll your mouse over the thumbnail and instantly video and audio will begin playing within that thumbnail showing you a preview of the video before you open it. This feature will come in handy if you do the occasional search for videos online and don't wish to waste your time hopping from website to website or dedicating yourself to one outlet like YouTube. It works suprisingly well and smoothly, whilst adding to the eye candy.
Related Sidebar
Bing has improved the expansiveness of the old search in that in the sidebar it'll figure out items that are related to your search term. So doing a search for iPhones brings back the related searches of “O2” the phone carrier, “iPhone Cost” and “iPhone Price” as possible other search terms you could try. After a couple of uses, it didn’t seem all that useful or relevant to me as like with Google, I know pretty much what I want to search and I think it would benefit the user a great deal more if there were a bigger variation in the list it gives you. So perhaps “iPhone Rumors” or “iPhone specifications” or “iPhone competitors” which might be of better interest. That said, it was a bit hit and miss with things like searching “Star Wars Movie” coming out with “Batman Movies” … anybody see the connection other than it’s a movie?
Also they've improved the way this sidebar integrates with shopping services such as Amazon, displaying the most likely items it thinks you're shopping for. However whilst it displays this new list down the side, this will probably only be good for people who want a quick price check and don't want to delve around a bunch of shopping sites.
Interface
Personally being a stickler for modern Web 2.0 type interfaces and websites, I hated the old Live search because it felt clunky, slow and outdated. There were too many things on the screen that weren't related at all to what you were searching and became the type of site to a lot of people where if you somehow found yourself on it, rather than using it, you'd be looking for the nearest exit even of it meant typing google out at the top.
The new design is much more up to date and in keeping with Microsofts other design styles such as that in Seadragon and some of the Silverlight Applications. It's simple, not cluttered and the backgrounds give it an elegant touch. The results are much better displayed where they look clear and well separated.
Search Engine
Why do you use a search engine? Well quite simply to search right? Well it seems the big wigs at Microsoft forgot about this minor detail when they were building Bing and improving the search algorithm. If they even did that. The searches are still far too imprecise and just don't match up to Googles true and trusted searches. Clearly there's some work left to do here after a number of searches done on Bing just weren't as good as Google. Quite puzzling enough, there appears to be three different versions of Bing depending on where you are. I’m using the UK version and a lot of the results vary hugely depending on where you’re based? Some would say this is a good thing as it provides more location based results but while using it, I found it made your results worse in general.
It should probably be noted that I also have the Firefox Extension "Wolfram Alpha Google" which has been suprisingly good and personally acts like an extension of my Google rather than a replacement. It fills the space in your google results with computational answers such as in my search term, "Carbohydrates in a Potato".
Impact
Live search was still the most commonly used search engine over Google although I put that down to it being the default for IE. So although it won't detract users away from Firefox, Bing will certainly help your nan find those crucial pasty recipes.
Conclusion
As good as it looks and as nifty as some of it's new features are, the reason we all use a search engine is to search and if that isn't up to par and you don't find what you're looking for then quite simply, the rest is history. Even if search wasn't improved all that much, at least those of you on IE will have something nice to look at if you’re still using the default search.
Oh and is it me or does the voice in the ad sound incredibly patronising?
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