What is Bing?
Bing is now the official MS search engine. Don’t bother searching Google for information about this evolution of Live Search. Here is the stuff you need to understand and use Bing.
According to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Bing is a “decision engine”
More than just a rebranding of Live Search, Microsoft is repositioning Bing as a “decision engine,” with a goal “to provide customers with intelligent search tools to help them simplify tasks and make more informed decisions,” according to a Microsoft spokesperson.
Bing’s “decision engine” will begin by focusing on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.
Bing includes some advancements to Live Search’s core search, such as entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition and document summarization technology. It also offers a new user experience model, which changes based on the query to offer more relevant decision-making tools.
Search Language
The search language seems to be the same as Live.com. The Bing Virtual Presskit outlines the features and search syntax quite well.
Feature Comparison
PCWorld has written a good article about the comparative merits of Google, Yahoo and Bing.
G Vs. B
If you want to compare the results you get with the same search term in Google and Bing go to Google Versus Bing.
Reviews
The reviews seem to imply Bing is like Bullwinkle saying, “watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat,” while Rocky looks on, having seen this trick fail every time saying, “oh Bullwinkle …” But Bullwinkle insists, “this time for sure!”
Karen Blakeman and Phil Bradley both feel that Bing offers nothing innovative. However, I like xRank which keeps track of notable people and puts them in order for you. This tends to be US-centric but it seems to help with Canadians and people with a strong web presence. I suspect that this has improved with the launch of Bing.
The other thing I like about Bing is the video search. I like how the results are presented.
What’s Bing Good For?
As a researcher, I find Bing good for two things. Searching for info about people and for its video search.
I have always liked xRank and it seems to be a bit better for Canadians in Bing, or it could be the strong bias in the results depending on where you are located that makes it work better in Bing. In the Extras>Preferences it allows you to select the location that creates this bias. (I have not been able to maintain the changes I make to the preferences from one session to another. This could be how I have the browser set-up.)
When I search by a person’s name, I change the preferences to indicate the city where the person lives and I get different results than if I leave it set to here Bing thinks I am located. I also shut-off the porn filter. Both of these changes will affect the result you see. In any case, this is the general purpose search engine to use for searching on a person’s name.
The video search allows you to see a preview of the videos before selecting any, this is a real time saver. This won’t replace blinkx or Samepoint but it is quite functional.
Richard – good post. I agree, nothing breakthrough, but overall, good user experience. And, if Microsoft is listening, we’d love to talk to them about integrating Samepoint’s aggregated social media data within their search results.
So far positive experience with Bing. I have a standard search (looking for myself) with which I benchmark search engines. Bing found an entry that Google (and others) as yet did not find. And an significant entry as well.
i have been evaluating the search results of Microsoft Bing compared to Google and they are comparable. Bing gives almost the same relevant search results just like Google.
Bing search engine gives almost the same search results as Google. Looks like Google will now have a tough competition when it comes to search engine technology.