Bing: A First Look

No sooner had Microsoft announced that it had named its new search engine Bing, had we started formulating the headlines at Web User. "Google to Microsoft: Bing it On", or even: "B(or)ing".

Microsoft has always faced tough competition where its online services are concerned. Both Gmail and Yahoo Mail poached thousands of surfers away from Hotmail, the granddaddy of email services, which has long since grown stale.

While it has made vast improvements to the latest version of its browser, Internet Explorer 8, it still lags behind open source browsers such as Firefox from Mozilla and even Google’s Chrome, if not in terms of user numbers, then where support for open web standards is concerned.

Web search is dominated by Google – so much so that the verb 'to Google' has been included in dictionaries since 2006. Live Search had failed to make much of an impression on Google, so what chance does Bing have?

Bing: The redeemer?
The first thing you’ll notice when you open Bing is the lavish homepage. Bing repeatedly shows up a beautiful image of a Greek island, with pristine white villas clinging to a cliff over the Mediterranean. Compared to Google’s blank page and its occasionally topical Doodles, it’s like champagne versus sparkling white wine from the bargain bin.

Bing uses a three-column format as default. The centre column returns the main searches while the right reveals sponsored messages, or advertisements, and the left column returns related searches.

Again, compared to Yahoo’s and Google’s two-column format, Bing’s layout feels more considered and less cluttered – so much so that it felt as if we had been using this service a long time.

Inner beauty
Looks matter massively in this design-obsessed age (just ask anyone who owns an iPhone), but what’s under the bonnet matters more. A quick search for 'Best Japanese restaurants London' showed up the same top hit across Bing, Yahoo and Google. Bing, however, did not return any related searches in its dedicated column.

Bing should show an excerpt of the text on a search result if you hover over it. However, this time-saving feature didn’t work for us at the time of writing.

Up until now, we have been happy for search engines to return a set of results which take us further into the web. But the new direction in search is centered around collation and computation. Wolfram Alpha has proved that search engines can answer questions on the fly and in the same window we search in.

Bing has adopted this principle. For example, when searching for flights to New York, along with the usual results Bing showed ticket prices for flights in real time, providing instant information to inform our search.

Yesterday's news
Search engines live or die not only by how relevant their results are but also by how fast and up to date they are. A search for 'Susan Boyle' returned top hits from YouTube with the news results further down – Google had its mix the other way around.

However, a news link on the left-hand column brought up the latest news stories, the most recent uploaded 21 minutes before the time of searching, slower than Google's most recently added story on the troubled celebrity by two minutes.

When searching for products in the Shopping section Bing defaults to Ciao, a Microsoft-owned online retailer. While it is understandable that Microsoft would push its own services, the internet is, at its core, about choice.

Video
One area that we particularly liked is the Video section. Again it trumps Google with its layout. Hover over any thumbnail video and it will play, sound and all, in that format. Over in the left-hand column you can refine your search by video size, length, resolution and source.

Microsoft could do with slapping an introductory video of its new search engine on the front page, to give new users a walkthrough of its services. We did manage to find one using Bing, though not that easily.

Bing - A better way to search (Microsoft video)

The internet is much like anything else in history: there are conquerors and giants and there is the rest of us. Google has ruled the world of search for the past 10 years; in fact it has built its empire around search. It seems at times inconceivable that it could be challenged, let alone toppled. While Microsoft has said its sights are on catching up with Yahoo, Bing is an well-presented search engine with innovations that put it ahead of both Yahoo and Google in certain areas.