After taking the new Bing search engine for a pre-release test ride, I'm amazed at what I see. But is it enough to keep Microsoft in the search game?
The first page that users obviously see is the home page. And with Bing, the first thing that hits you (yes it sounds silly, but it's true) is the colorful and eye-catching background picture. What makes this even more productive is that when you roll over hotspots, hints are displayed which when clicked take you to videos and images on the topic. Live Search already has a background image like this, but Bing takes it one step further.
Another area that Bing really seems to work well in is when you know the name of a site but can't remember the URL. Granted at the moment it only really works well with mainstream sites that are well known and mainstream, but it does have potential though as it saves a heck of alot of time having to try and navigate through thirty-plus results to find the site you're looking for.
You know when you are searching for information, and you get a whole heap of results which you have to click on to get to the little bit of information you need? It's time consuming, and Microsoft have realised this, building in some handy hover features which allow you to preview the information on the pages before you even have to visit the site. Try hovering over a result and then click the orange diamond at the end - It's a nifty feature that I'm sure will save a lot of time trying to find information that you need.
Microsoft have also worked on their related searches display. Instead of showing above your results a "You may also be interested in.." similar to what Google sometimes does, you can find on the left hand side of the page a handy navigation bar with some suggested topics.
Video and images have also received a great overhaul. You know how in other search engines you get say 30 pictures per page before you have to go to the next one? Well Bing eliminates the need for pages, instead displaying all results on one single page, saving load times and allowing you to find your images quicker. I noticed its not yet working for videos, but for images it works great!
Bing's new filtering for images and videos works extremely well - and it's so handy being able to cut down on your results using filters that you can set. By allowing you to choose from things such as colour, size, people and style Bing really lets you customize your results.
An while you're at it, try hovering over a video. It'll start playing right from the search page! This allows you to preview a video before you load the full clip and can save you from having to watch and wait for heaps of videos to load - instead you can see if the preview fits what you're looking for!
And just when I thought I'd seen it all along came another surprise - Bing Shopping. It takes Live Shopping one step further, and displays results in a clear and concise manner. By showing you the price and some quick information it can save you countless hours having to trawl through all those shopping websites (of which so many now exist).
So is Bing seriously going to be able to compete with the likes of Google and Yahoo? Ultimately I don't think that's where Microsoft is heading - instead I think they're targeting a niche and attempting to focus on removing all those '10 blue links' as Yahoo likes to call them. Bing really does this quite well - I'll certainly use Bing a lot more than I used to use Live search.
However for those of us not in the United States of America we've still got a while to wait until Microsoft finally rolls out a localised version of Bing. I'm trying to get a scope of just how long that may be (I'll update this when I can get a comment) but at the moment it looks like we could be in for the long haul.
Microsoft have now released Bing to the public. You can try it now at bing.com.
