One of the big announcements in June was the arrival of Bing, the re-branded, re-designed Microsoft search engine previously known as Live. Although there was a lot of comment on Bing taking on Google the reality is that Bing will not beat Google in the immediate future but has introduced some interesting new features into the search arena. Whereas Google has pretty much lead the pack in terms of innovation for the last seven years Bing could be elbowing its way in.
I need to state that I have not been a big MS fan and have even started weaning myself off the Office suite of products and on to Google Docs. That being said there are several things about Bing I like and will have some impact on the future development of search across the board. Firstly the simple front page and the changing images. It looks like Bing are running photo competitions on Facebook so the photographers amongst us may have the chance for a picture on the Bing home page! The search engine results page (SERP) I do like although I have seen comments saying the page was cluttered. I like the idea of the Related Searches especially when researching a topic I am not familiar. Bing is very fast and returning results quickly was no problem.
There is a neat little preview of the content for each result on the right hand side and links. I haven't worked out exactly how Bing decides on the content for this feature but I can see this being very useful. There are links for Images, Videos, Shopping etc. across the top which are handy. What is particularly nice is that you can hove the mouse over a video and watch the play back.
What are the things I don't like about Bing? I do not like the way Microsoft the use of the term 'decision engine' instead of 'search engine'. It was a term dreamt up in the marketing department and is meaningless. I have also taken a blind test http://blindsearch.fejus.com on Google, Bing and Yahoo and Google still scores about 80% of the time with me. Although I was surprised at some of the very relevant returns from Bing.
In summary Bing is not a Google Killer but does bring some good innovation that will keep all search engines on their toes.
