My first impression if Bing.com was Wow. It looked good, was very fast and gave good results. It is both elegant and intuitive. It includes some convenient features like “autoplay” tool that lets users preview videos from within Bing by hovering the mouse over them. It includes a lefthand navigation menu called the “Explorer Pane. ” The Explorer Pane can be very useful, showing you context specific information including related searches and your search history.
One problem that I see with the autoplay feature is that Bing allow users to preview pornographic videos from within Bing. You never have to leave the site. You just have to turn the adult-content filters off. It takes a second to do. If you have any problems just ask the nearest kid. I imagine that this feature would circumvent any parental software installed. I can see this feature changing once this issue hits the mainstream media.
After playing with Bing a bit more I slowly started returning to earth. It was a nice trip while it lasted. Bing completely missed the mark on some searches. It found some of my pages that were nowhere near the most relevant from my site. I would not consider myself to be an expert on Microsoft’s old search. To tell you the truth I haven’t used MSN seriously in so long that I don’t what it’s results should look like but the results definitely looked better that the old Windows live / MSN results. I also noticed that Bing had had very up-to-date cache data of my sites.
Bing, like Yahoo, seems to rely heavily on onpage factors. Titles, descriptions and page content are capable of swaying results. If they ever gained a significant market share people would quickly game the results.
Google does not have to worry about losing it’s #1 position in the search world, not any time soon at least. On the other hand, I believe that Microsoft may have something strong to build on. I will look to see even better things in the coming year. If they can improve on their offpage search factors then I think they have a chance. They may also appeal to a niche that favors style over substance. Anyway, competition is good.
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Published on June 3rd, 2009 | 3 Comments | Posted by admin |
3 Responses to “Bing – Microsoft Impresses with its New Search Engine”
Good summary on Bing. What intrigued me most about Bing’s arrival is that it attempts to put a new spin, namely context on the ‘old’ search engine game. In as much as this propels Google and others to out-innovate each other, this is definitely a good thing.
Chris
nice post! and i first time see a site thats name is bing it just like a game name.interesting.
Well, we shouldn’t be too hard with them. Bing.com is still in a beta state. I have been playing with different search queries and have not complaints so far.
Also, remember that it is the big giant the one pulling the strings of this puppy.