Microsoft’s new search engine Bings the hell out of Google
Okay, so Microsoft did have its own search engine before. It was called Live Search and maybe one person in any given peer group had an inkling it existed, but most people never even heard of it; definitely didn’t use it. So search is not exactly “new” to Microsoft. But what’s getting everyone’s attention now is being called Microsoft’s “new” search engine, and maybe they’ll even use it.
What’s exciting about Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to innovate the live search engine realm, or as they call it, a “decision engine”, besides the fact that it features my favorite color orange(!!!), is that it is a more cohesive approach to search, and, more importantly (haha), Chris and I were a (tiny) part of it.
Chris and I were pseudo beta testers for the underlying architecture that powers Bing, back when it was called Powerset and friends and family were asked to casually stroll through its capabilities and yay or nay it out. It was only hooked up to Wikipedia, so it was far from comprehensive, but it was still a fantastic start. Finally, we thought, a search engine trying to consider phrase queries. A search engine that wasn’t afraid to take a couple more thousandths of a second to provide actual relevant results. Cool.
Bing focuses on four main properties: Travel, Shopping, Health, and Local search. Like the two top guns, Bing allows quick text toggles between web, image, video, news, and map searches. One difference is the elevated shopping experience; Bing allows selective filtered searches (by brand, category, price), a dive into their proprietary product database with a massive list of retailers, consolidated opinion ranking from multiple review sites. Bing also offers the continuation of the Cashback program, Microsoft’s consumer incentive program, which may be both an auspicious and evil omen in our current economy.
For now, Bing’s presence resembles a copy-cat culmination of the web’s best parts: Yahoo!’s slick styling and healthy UI, Google’s simplicity and ease, even flickr’s descriptive note-esque tooltips and rich photoscapes, and some of the expected worst: terribly ancient link and info colors and paragraph structure that are widely ignored. But, once again, a great start.
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