Bing Bing: Microsoft

Bing, Microsoft's newest take on web search, is open to everyone this morning. What makes it different from its really, really well-known competition, and what unique features does it offer? Let's take a look at early reviews and discoveries.

In the wee hours of the morning, Microsoft flipped the switch and whether you like the name or not, Live Search has been bumped by Bing.

After finally getting a chance to test it out, I'm definitely more likely to use Bing than I was to use Live search. While it doesn't have the same tricks up its sleeves as Google (like unit conversions and exchange rates yes, yes it does - thanks, Bob!) it's still got plenty of nice touches. Search for a pro athlete, like the Red Wings' Jonathan Ericsson, and you'll get stats from his last performance, upcoming games, and more. Pretty slick.

You can also subscribe to any set of results via RSS and save search history in your Live account. The related searches, suggested refinements (like fights, biography, and quotes in the picture), and on-hover snippets help make researching a topic easier.

You might have heard the news of search engine Bing – Microsoft’s rebranding effort after Live failed to take over the search crown from Google – going live. Expectedly, the web search results are often copying Google’s style but are of [edit]somewhat lower quality on a couple of queries I tried (but please add your comments in regards to search results quality)[/edit]. One interesting feature however is the video search, because it offers direct animated previews as soon as you hover over a given video thumbnail; combine this with the site operator, as in the search site:blogoscoped.com*, and you can get a good, uncluttered overview of videos shown or embedded on a given domain. The same search on Google Video returns... zero.

The image search of Bing – a word meaning “cold [mp3]” (as in fridge [mp3]) as well as “sick” in Chinese, among other meanings depending on the tones** – offers one noteworthy difference in comparison to Google Image Search. When you click on an image from the result thumbnail list, you’ll land on the target page with the image on top as with Google. But on the left side, you can also see other thumbs from the result page you were on before, so you can quickly click through the rest of the images. However, on the downside, you can’t use shift-click on a thumb to open a page in a new instance... this greatly lowers usability for people who like to control their browser windows or tabs.

A nice thing about Bing is that they automatically insert in-page anchor links below some snippets. A search for scientology wikipedia, for instance, has links like “Etymology”, “History”, “Organization” and more pointing straight to that part within the Wikipedia.org page. (There’s also an “enhanced view" for Wikipedia pages, which basically reprints the – GNU-licensed – wiki entry and adds an always-visible navigation box to the right.)

Just as with Google these days, Bing also has auto-completion. This picture was posted on Reddit under the headline “Seems like bing.com is indexing a different [Internet] than Google”.

As Inquistir's Duncan Riley points out, things aren't all working the way we were promised in teaser videos. Example: hotel and shopping searches don't automatically present the tweaked results views - you'll need to go to bing.com/shopping or bing.com/travel to try them out.

Firefox users wanting to add Bing to you search box, here's your addon - contributed by our pal Long Zheng at IStartedSomething. Live Search addons will still work just fine, too.

As of this morning, Bing.com seems to have replaced Live.com (with Live.com redirecting to Bing) as Microsoft's prime search product. It was supposed to launch Wednesday, but apparently went live early in the morning today. Many international users have noted different results and features in different languages and IP addresses, so be aware that everything listed below might not apply to all "versions" of Bing.

Video Previews: Right now, it's a blessing and a curse for Bing. Digital Inspiration suggests that international users can use Bing to watch fairly lengthy previews of Hulu clips by hovering their mouse over the results for search terms like "The Office." That's pretty helpful, assuming you like automatic video plays with sound. Then Loic Le Meur tweaks the safe search settings and points out that Bing will preview any video clip—including the kind that get you fired at work. Yikes.



Search Categories: Jury's still out on whether these will grow to become truly helpful, or just provide a Search For Dummies outlet. Right now, broad searches for terms with deep results bring up suggestive, possibly helpful categories to try searching under. The results are pretty entropic, though—"digital cameras," a term for which there has to be a helpful way to organize things, yields links for repairs, price comparison, and other good stuff, while "dual monitors" includes just shopping links and related videos.

Shopping: Bing has pretty much taken over Microsoft's previous search entity, Live.com, and that includes the occasionally great cashback bonuses and somewhat sophisticated shopping organization. Honestly, if Bing wants to set itself apart from certain other search engines, it could focus on being a truly great shopping start point that offers incentives and smarter results. As it is, it just neatly organizes results for single products and semi-specific categories.

RSS results feeds: Nothing too sexy to show off, but your browser should auto-detect an RSS feed on the results page for search terms, and, given that it's a new and growing search database, Bing's results feeds might give you some new and intriguing links on the items you're keeping up with.

Early Reviews

* Gizmodo: "In the automatically generated top links for Gizmodo are months-old links to single posts about the second Bill Gates/Seinfeld ad and leaked box shots of the Zune 16GB and 160GB models. Really?"
* Ars Technica: "The results for some queries blow my mind: how is it possible that the results can be so preposterously useless? Other times, though, a comparison with the old Live Search shows that Bing obviously has had its algorithm tweaked for the better."
* Mashable: "There's at least three very different versions of Bing right now, and depending on where you are, your Bing experience will be very different. It's a very weird decision from Microsoft, bound to cause a lot of confusion, but hey: it's the Microsoft way."
* Technologizer: "Bing attempts to differentiate itself from what Steve Ballmer would call "the market leader" in search by focusing on helping users with four common action-oriented search tasks: making a purchase, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business."
* ReadWriteWeb: "The main difference between the two search engines is that Bing offers more options on the left, including special sections for symptons, medication, children, etc. It also offers 'related searches', which with health-related searches is typically helpful ... With Google you can get more options too, but you have to click "Show Options..." - which we're not sure how many users do."

Finally, here's a video tour of Bing, for those voyeuristic types who aren't into actually testing out a search engine with real queries.

While Bing brings a few nifty amenities to the table (I do like the Related Searches and Search History in the sidebar), ultimately any search engine is only as good as its results. Live Search’s results always sucked, IMHO. Bing’s are better — though far from perfect.

For example, a search for “Business Hacks” yielded yours truly as the top result (well, the top after two ad links), but no related results on the side. A search for “iPhone” produced all kinds of goodies, including subcategories (Accessories, Software, etc.), images, and the like.

Bing’s coolest feature is video preview: Mouse over any video thumbnail and it immediately starts playing — no need to click through to the hosting site. Alas, it remains thumbnail-size — it’d be great if you could opt for a larger window.

So, yeah, there’s some good stuff here. But for now Google will remain my go-to search engine, because I know it’ll give me the most accurate results.

Give Bing a try for yourself, then let us know what you think. Better than Live Search? Better than Google, even? Or still just an also-ran?

Another strange thing is that bing, from Microsoft, is using Flash from Adobe and not Silverlight from Microsoft. Now if you think about that, it’s not all that strange. They want the widest possible adoption of the service most likely and Silverlight isn’t the predominant video player on the web so they had to go with the strongest player in the market. After all, how many of you would choose to install a video player plugin over just going someplace that already let you search based on a plugin you probably already had installed?

In regards to the advanced search capabilities, Google still gives more options and that means easier searching overall in my book. I can drill down to exactly what I’m looking for far more clearly. Plus Google offers some serious keyword search filtering and with the coming of HTML 5 and the Video tag I think that’s going to put them in the forefront though the others will have plenty of time to bolster their keyword search options before it becomes widely accepted. Microsoft knows that it won’t become the world leader in search overnight but they’re hoping that it will gain some widespread use.

Of course what is bing at its most basic? It’s LIVE search right? It’s LIVE search with a new coat of paint, some additional options and a new name. And doesn’t it look a lot like Google from the top left corner of the browser? Almost the same list of options even.

Sure it’s another place that will catalog and index all of our video content and some people will always prefer Microsoft over the others so it will probably find its niche in the market.