What do you think of Bing?
So Microsoft officially changed their Live search to Bing a few days ago. I was never one to use MSN Live to search (ever), but when I put it through the paces, I have to say, it’s not bad at all!
Although the name sounds a little campy to me, what matters is performance. Unlike Cuil which has already been largely disregarded as a lame search engine, Bing looks and behaves amazingly similar to Google, except with a little more bling added (pardon the pun).
Bing has a better image and video search, which kinda reminds me of the old Google Searchmash. If you look in the Extras section on the top right corner of Bing, there are a few extra features that you might not have noticed, which varies depending on where you specify yourself to be from. To change your geo-location, just click on the country at the top right hand and you will be presented with a whole list of countries and language options.
The most number of features is currently limited to US based surfers, in which there is a Cashback savings option, meaning you can earn back money by buying from those participating merchant’s whose advertising fees are “passed back” down to you. I do not know how Microsoft intends to manage this whole cashback thing efficiently to properly credit everyone (should it really get popular), but it looks like there was an old Cashback option at the old Live.com (which obviously never took off).
And then there is a “Webmaster Center” which only seems to apply for US folks as well. I submitted a site of mine to Bing using their “Webmaster Tools” by uploading an XML file given by Bing. Very similar to Google’s Webmaster Tools except much more basic of course. There is also a (basic) Blog option which isn’t available for all countries. But like Yahoo 360° which is closing down shortly, I don’t see this going anywhere.
Notwithstanding all these quibbles, Bing is performing well, and have these in its favor:
- its search results are strikingly similar to Google’s (I wonder why?!)
- auto defaulted to become the default search engine on IE 6 and 7
- curiosity factor
- good video and image search
- the text search look and feel (and sponsored links) are nothing short of a Google clone
- mousing over the results gives additional info about the site or page
- nice wallpaper background which change every day and come with “hidden” Easter eggs
The reactions from Yahoo and the public are expected. I do not think Yahoo is going to be overtly concerned with Bing, because of its strong position in social media. But if China’s ban on Bing is any gauge of its efficiency, I think this “new upstart” should pat itself on the back.
While still very premature to think that Bing will become a strong contender to Google, but judging from its results, it looks like it could become a Google junior. But It’s Not Google, definitely.
Bing seems fine. I am glad Microsoft and Yahoo keep trying. Google is still far from perfect and some real competition would be good. But I am also not incredibly impressed with Bing. I do think it is an improvement over Microsoft’s past attempts but it is no real threat to Google yet. I will probably continue to try it (along with Yahoo) something I rarely did with Live.
I have seen some very funny result on Bing I ran a very searches and I found that search results for the company I work for seemed to be dependent almost exclusively on on page factors, pages that only had a single plain text incidence of the keyword were ranking on page two.
Maybe those pages had a lot of link popularity but they certainly would not have had in bound links with link text with our company name in it.
I actually really like it. Whether I like it enough to stop using google remains to be seen.
I especially like the video search, where you can mouse over a thumbnail and it starts playing.
Actually the new Bing.com looks good. At least when I tried to search some biology related keywords, I get more accurate results than Google.
I think time has been telling on Bing, the SERPS have shown quite a few of the old cracks which Live had.
On the plus side though, I love the interface it uses, the little expand bit on the right of each result in massively helpful in making the decision to click through or not and I love the way in which the image search interface handles.
@ Andrew Thomson
Yeah, I agree with you, but Bing is still a HUGE improvement over the old Live.
I think Bing is great and in some search terms even better than Google. Keeping in mind that its only 3 weeks old I think its a tough challenge for Google with huge positive response from almost everyone. And with feature like Twitter in search results Microsoft is scaring Google and building a better brand for long term.
Interesting thing to see would be What improvements Microsoft will make in Bing in upcoming months, do they have some more tricks to hurt Google?
I live the aesthetics of it, although it seems to bring up lesser quality sites in search results.
As everything takes a little while to get accepted by the masses, even Bing will take some time to get accepted as Google replacement.
Bing has got serous potential to compete with Google.
Great post. In some markets I am in, I noticed Bing lays some big emphasis on content although not many incoming links as far as rankings are concerned. There is an interesting site which you can check the results from Google and Bing side by side. It’s at bingandgoogle.com
I believe Bing is a search engine to watch in the future. It will be interesting to know how much search share it can take from Google after the massive million dollar advertising made by the software giant online and on tv.
But I think getting a large majority of people to change their Google’s habit can still be a difficult task.