Microsoft Bing the (new) search engine from Microsoft is live today for everyone. My first impression is that atleast it is better than the live search, live search really sucks. There are some nice features in Bing, but whether users will stick to it or not is difficult to tell now.
I tested bing with some queries and vanity searches, it shows pretty good results in some cases but for some keywords it pulls up lot of junk which is not relevant to the one you are searching, same like Live search. Microsoft what’s up is this really a new search engine or dressedup live search. But some results are good may be they tweaked live search, i didn’t use live search recently so I can’t tell now.
If you are outside US like me, then you will see localized Bing, change it to United States, there is a link in the top right corner to change. I was greeted with a France version, i changed it to US immediately, features like search history is missing in these localized versions.
On the left side of the search results you will see your search history, related searches. Using related searches you can drill down your search to get what you wanted in the first place. of course of you use exact queries it is not of much use anyway. Search history can be saved if you login with MSN ID.
Bing gives sub categories for known queries like places, i searched for Hyderabad, India it showed up results, along with sub categories for the search including maps, weather etc. But for more general queries it just shows all search results and no sub categories.
Bing search results show longer text from the web page when hovering on the search result, a small icon will show up on the right side, place your mouse on this to see longer text and links from the web page.
Image Search:
Nothing much changed from Live search, you can zoom the images and allows to scroll continuously to see more images with out clicking next page links. Shows Images in 4 ways, small thumbnails, medium thumbs, large and large with descriptions.
Video Search
Video search is something interesting, the videos will start playing if you hover your mouse over the video. With the preview you can see what the video has to offer before going to the site. Video search offers filters like length of the video, resolution and source.
Shopping
Bing shopping results are very good, they will carry Microsoft Cash Back program links wherever applicable and also it shows the discount you will get with the product purchase. The shopping results can be drilled down to price ranges, using categories, brands and other options.
Overall Bing shows some promise and offers better results than live but not better than Google results. Still it is early to say whether users will like it, since it is new may be Microsoft guys will tweak it more to improve the results. Have you tried Bing yet?, if so what do you think?.
bing definitely does a few things better than google, and, so, for now, i’m going to give it a try and see how it holds up for “real world” searches. so far, i like it. and if i can’t find something on bing, i can always try the same search on google. what’s most important is that all of these search engines are improving.
Wasn’t live search new just a few months ago? Microsoft = fail.
it seems like Microsoft is having a search engine identity crisis
Okay, so I guess, back to Google (as expected, anyway)
Bing is probably good for your kids because I heard that it filters porn and stuff
Bing seems pretty good but again, it is way too difficult to comete with the enourmous amount of people that use google and have their toolbar in their browsers. But hey, I have microsoft stock, so from now on Im only using Bing. 🙂 Google needs to be weakened, they are taking over the world.
@esb
yes it does some things better, image search and shopping, video search are good.
@Smokey
haa yes, Microsoft is changing names every now and then but so far it didn’t have any effect.
@Philip
Yes it is hard job to convince users to give up their Google habit.
How do I stop “Bing” from poppong up all the time??? It ia annoying as hell….If I want it or need it I know how to get it, I do not want it always being there.
The only problem with Bing that I have found is that in the Image searches when you turn it to “Large” pictures the pictures are still pretty small and when you turn it to “Wallpaper” they are like no results because my resolution is high. This means you have to filter through all the bad pictures and really look carefully at the resolutions. Its really annoying.