Bing: Microsoft’s new search engine

By Charles-Henry Ruyant

Today is the release of the new search engine from Microsoft ‘Bing’. Bing is supposed to compete with rival Google on the search engine market. This new search engine was internally tested few months ago under the name Kumo.

Bing has a similar presentation to that Live.com. The Web search is quick and clear. The results and look are very similar to Google; Microsoft has finally filled the gap with Google in terms or relevancy of the result. The advantage over Google is a little pop-up window when you have your mouse on one result. This little pop-up gives you more information about the website and some internal links; it is a pretty good idea. We can also directly subscribe to RSS feed (if possible) via the result page, once again it is pretty smart.

Bing - Pop-up

Still on the web search section, Microsoft tries to include too many ads on the search engine result page. We can count, for some competitive keywords (e.g.: ‘car insurance’), four on the top, two on the bottom and five on the right side. It is simply too much!

Bing - Ads

On the image search of Bing, it is once again difficult to see any improvement compared to Live.com or Google. There isn’t any duplicate image filter and it is easy to have two or three time the same picture and the image result page. Microsoft has some work to do. The good thing about this section is that when you click on a image you still have the other result on a left bar, which is very user friendly.

Bing - Search Images

The video section is the one that I like the most. Nothing new but it is a lot more user friendly than Google video. On one search video results page you can play a video just by passing your mouse over it, which makes it very easy to see which video you want to select.

Bing - Video Result Page

The News section is unfortunately without interest (does the job but nothing new here) and the Shopping and Maps sections link to other Microsoft websites.

In conclusion, Bing is very similar to Google and the few improvements will not be enough (I think) to really beat Google. However, Microsoft can maybe expect to increase or at least keep the same amount of the market share.

Anyway, it is still very good to see that Google’s competition is doing something!