Ok, well we saw a video of Bing recently and I wasn't that hopeful based on what I'd seen. The 'decision engine' has now launched properly so we can all play with it. If you're short on time the quick review is 'It's awful. Worse than I was expecting - Microsoft, what are you thinking?' The longer version is below.
There's virtually nothing that's new or innovative with Bing, and every screen that I look at reminds me of another engine. The opening screen looks like Ask, with the search box in a similar position, an image background, a choice below the search box for 'show all' or 'only from United Kingdom' and search options above - web, images, videos, shopping, news, maps, more. Ok.. a cross between Ask and Google.
When you start to search you're given suggested options, so nothing new about that. However, a search for hubble *doesn't* suggest hubble telescope! 'hubble space telescope', 'hubble images', 'hubble homes' and so on, but not the obvious choice.
We get our results, with related searches to the left, results in the middle and sponsored sites to the right. Nothing new or interesting in that. The summary of pages is sketchy to say the least - a bit of text, URL and link to cached pages. No indication of size of the page, when it was updated or visited, no thumbnail. I will however give some points because if you hold your cursor over the entry a little side box pops out giving a little more detail and 'more on this page', which is a reasonable solution, but I'd still prefer to see content on the page.
There is an advanced search function, which allows me to choose to add all terms, any terms, phrase or to exclude terms, but I have to add these one at a time. I can also restrict searches to a domain or specific site, choose a country (though despite what they say I can't search on a region such as Europe as I can with Exalead for example) or I can search limited to a language. However, when I tried this, by limiting to Albanian the first result was a page from the Guardian website about the Bronte sisters. So - not Albanian OR about the hubble telescope. Genius Microsoft, utter genius!
Image search isn't bad, with a sensible related searches option (better than when searching the web in fact), and the image pops out slightly larger if you mouse over it, with size and URL, with an option for similar images. This works reasonably well, and all the images are on the single page - you just keep getting more as you scroll down, which I quite like. There are search options for Size, Layout, Color, Style and People, which is a Google copy really.
Video option works ok, and an image starts to play immediately you cursor over it, though it doesn't play the entire video.
Shopping is a bit weird, since I was taken from the Bing site and dumped at somewhere called ciao! This was quite disconcerting, and it happened for every shopping search that I tried. Moreover, there wasn't a link to get me back to Bing either - I had to click to go back to the site via the browser back button. I've got no idea what's going on there, and while I could find out, if Microsoft can't be bothered to tell me upfront I fail to see why I should care.
News search is quite simply a joke. Brief headline, link to resource, and when the news item was listed. No suggestions, no way of rearranging the results - just the option to save as an RSS feed.
The Maps option takes me to multimap. This is reasonable in the sense that we're told (if we look hard enough) that this is 'From Microsoft Live Search' (note - not 'From Bing), but it leads to a further dislocation of resources. Bing is becoming something that is rather less than the sum of its parts.
Under the 'More option' we're given the chance to search web, videos, images and hang on - how is this 'more'? Oh, we're offered xRank, which is the only 'more' resource that we've not already seen. It's rather like a trending tool, but only works when you give it a search, so you have to kind of know what's trending for it to work properly. Interestingly there's an 'extras' option in the top right, with the chance to search blogs. Apparently it wouldn't have been sensible to include this under the 'more' option. I don't know why, but quite frankly by this point I'm giving up trying to work out how the rat's maze that is Microsoft's mind works. I presume that it's because this resource just links to their 'Bing Community'; it's not (as I first thought) a blog search option. Every other useful search engine has the chance to search blogs and some social media, but Bing doesn't clearly find this necessary.
There are many irritations with Bing. For example, if you click on help you are taken to a page over a Live.com, not Bing. Microsoft have launched a search engine (sorry, decision engine) and are too cheap or incompetent to provide their own help pages - they've simply redirected to their old engine! I discovered this while trying to change the search filter to strict. I can do this in Live, but there doesn't seem to be a way of doing it in Bing unless you really play around. By going into Images, running a search, changing the safe search option there, I can then ensure that it's changed throughout the system. What a mess. It's not that Bing doesn't have a page for Search preferences, it's just that it's almost impossible to get to it.
Bing is a total shambles. It's a mixture of the old, the borrowed and the bolted on. It provides virtually nothing noteworthy and I can't honestly see any reason to use it. What a wasted opportunity.
There's virtually nothing that's new or innovative with Bing, and every screen that I look at reminds me of another engine. The opening screen looks like Ask, with the search box in a similar position, an image background, a choice below the search box for 'show all' or 'only from United Kingdom' and search options above - web, images, videos, shopping, news, maps, more. Ok.. a cross between Ask and Google.
When you start to search you're given suggested options, so nothing new about that. However, a search for hubble *doesn't* suggest hubble telescope! 'hubble space telescope', 'hubble images', 'hubble homes' and so on, but not the obvious choice.
We get our results, with related searches to the left, results in the middle and sponsored sites to the right. Nothing new or interesting in that. The summary of pages is sketchy to say the least - a bit of text, URL and link to cached pages. No indication of size of the page, when it was updated or visited, no thumbnail. I will however give some points because if you hold your cursor over the entry a little side box pops out giving a little more detail and 'more on this page', which is a reasonable solution, but I'd still prefer to see content on the page.
There is an advanced search function, which allows me to choose to add all terms, any terms, phrase or to exclude terms, but I have to add these one at a time. I can also restrict searches to a domain or specific site, choose a country (though despite what they say I can't search on a region such as Europe as I can with Exalead for example) or I can search limited to a language. However, when I tried this, by limiting to Albanian the first result was a page from the Guardian website about the Bronte sisters. So - not Albanian OR about the hubble telescope. Genius Microsoft, utter genius!
Image search isn't bad, with a sensible related searches option (better than when searching the web in fact), and the image pops out slightly larger if you mouse over it, with size and URL, with an option for similar images. This works reasonably well, and all the images are on the single page - you just keep getting more as you scroll down, which I quite like. There are search options for Size, Layout, Color, Style and People, which is a Google copy really.
Video option works ok, and an image starts to play immediately you cursor over it, though it doesn't play the entire video.
Shopping is a bit weird, since I was taken from the Bing site and dumped at somewhere called ciao! This was quite disconcerting, and it happened for every shopping search that I tried. Moreover, there wasn't a link to get me back to Bing either - I had to click to go back to the site via the browser back button. I've got no idea what's going on there, and while I could find out, if Microsoft can't be bothered to tell me upfront I fail to see why I should care.
News search is quite simply a joke. Brief headline, link to resource, and when the news item was listed. No suggestions, no way of rearranging the results - just the option to save as an RSS feed.
The Maps option takes me to multimap. This is reasonable in the sense that we're told (if we look hard enough) that this is 'From Microsoft Live Search' (note - not 'From Bing), but it leads to a further dislocation of resources. Bing is becoming something that is rather less than the sum of its parts.
Under the 'More option' we're given the chance to search web, videos, images and hang on - how is this 'more'? Oh, we're offered xRank, which is the only 'more' resource that we've not already seen. It's rather like a trending tool, but only works when you give it a search, so you have to kind of know what's trending for it to work properly. Interestingly there's an 'extras' option in the top right, with the chance to search blogs. Apparently it wouldn't have been sensible to include this under the 'more' option. I don't know why, but quite frankly by this point I'm giving up trying to work out how the rat's maze that is Microsoft's mind works. I presume that it's because this resource just links to their 'Bing Community'; it's not (as I first thought) a blog search option. Every other useful search engine has the chance to search blogs and some social media, but Bing doesn't clearly find this necessary.
There are many irritations with Bing. For example, if you click on help you are taken to a page over a Live.com, not Bing. Microsoft have launched a search engine (sorry, decision engine) and are too cheap or incompetent to provide their own help pages - they've simply redirected to their old engine! I discovered this while trying to change the search filter to strict. I can do this in Live, but there doesn't seem to be a way of doing it in Bing unless you really play around. By going into Images, running a search, changing the safe search option there, I can then ensure that it's changed throughout the system. What a mess. It's not that Bing doesn't have a page for Search preferences, it's just that it's almost impossible to get to it.
Bing is a total shambles. It's a mixture of the old, the borrowed and the bolted on. It provides virtually nothing noteworthy and I can't honestly see any reason to use it. What a wasted opportunity.
....and, if you connect from Australia..you get offered UK results also...hellooo - another hemisphere down here....
Posted by: Kathryn Greenhill | June 01, 2009 at 07:18 AM
Thanks Phil for your detailed review. Love how you explore everything and let us know about it. Looks like I won't bother with Bing!
Posted by: Jenny Luca | June 01, 2009 at 09:54 AM
Would I be right in thinking you don't like it Phil! :-) I quite like te image search, but then again that was the one bit of 'Live' that I quite liked too, so that probably isn't saying a lot. And whilst after a quick play I would not go as far as to say it's awful, I would agree on first look that it doesn't really seem to offer anything that would make you change your default search (most likely google).
Posted by: Scott | June 01, 2009 at 09:57 AM
Personally the first thing I would say is visually it looks awful. I mean did web designers for Bing go back to 1998? It does not stand out as clean, has more bugs than live (which is odd being this is mainly a reskinning of live) and despite some good press, I don't expect it to push the market figures one way or another!
- Daniel Clarke.
Lead Dev MSE360.com
Posted by: Daniel Clarke | June 01, 2009 at 01:45 PM
Yes, I try it , nice one, perfect look, but still google is the best, hope in future it will be side by side with google
Thanks
Posted by: website promotion services | June 01, 2009 at 03:31 PM
Wow....so closed... Personally I think Bing works great. Much more relevant searches than googasaur.
And no, I'm not a fanboy, use OS X as my preferrded OS. Google is bloated and in need of a facelift.
Posted by: Shane | June 01, 2009 at 08:27 PM
Now try another interesting search. Type in "linux" and check the proposals on Bing and compare them to Google..."linux microsoft" appears second. Weird...Bing is too much microsoft oriented. I don't really like that behavior
Posted by: Valentin | June 02, 2009 at 10:31 AM
A non-event to me... I would always give preference to Exalead or Ask as an alternative to GG and Y!
Posted by: Thomas | June 05, 2009 at 09:41 AM
Nice article. Bing has come along pretty well in its initial phase. I wrote an article on MS Bing which has been followed with a good discussion, please find on my webpage link given along
Posted by: Gaurav Parashar | June 19, 2009 at 08:16 AM