On Bing…
In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft released it’s new search engine, Bing early. I was (and always have been) just a little on the skeptical side when it comes to Microsoft’s products. Which has made me just a little jaded. But, I was curious about this new search engine even though it still makes me think of the Sopranos (which I’m sure was not Microsoft’s intention…right?)
After using it for a few minutes I immediately found quite a few things that I like over Google’s search results.
First, it’s a heck of a lot cleaner. Google has slowly added in their Universal search results into the natural results so much so that it’s become messy. You’ve got web pages, images, videos, news stories, blog posts, suggested searches, and ads at the top and side of nearly every search results page. And while they’ve done their best to cater to the masses and still do provide the best relevant search results, I especially like a few things about Bing over Google.
- It’s fast. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly search results were returned. It was a lot faster than I had expected.
- When you do a search in Bing and hover over any of the listings you’ll notice a bar with a small orange dot next to the listing. When you hover over the listing itself, a quick preview of the web page will show up on the right. Interesting note here. In Chrome, it only works for the first listing, once. At least this has been in my experience. In Firefox, you have to hover over the orange dot but in IE each preview shows just by hovering over the listing itself.
- Related searches are shown to the left of the search results instead of at the bottom of the page like Google. I find this much easier to use.
- Your recent search history is shown to the left of the listings as well. With a click you can go back to a search you just did instead of having to search again or resorting to using your back button like you do with Google. You can also clear your searches all together or even hide them if you want.
- Like Google, you have a video link at the top of the page. However, and this is one feature I really like with Bing, unlike Google where you’re shown a listing of various videos from various places, Bing let’s you organize the videos by length, screen size, resolution and source (YouTube, Hulu, Metacafe, etc.). Whereas in Google’s video search results, you have to scroll through the listings to find out this information. The downside is that of all of the video sources available, Bing only lists a handful.
- The images link also allows you to sort by size, layout, color, & people. Again, a nice feature that let’s you drill down to what it is you’re looking for instead of having to scroll through pages and pages of images.
- The “related searches” in Bing are, at least in my opinion, more related to the search term that I entered than what Google believes would be related. For example, in doing a search on “Spring Cleaning” Google suggests that I might be wanting a “spring cleaning poem” which couldn’t be further from what I was seeking.
- The search results themselves. Here we get to the heart of it all. While Google has gained the reputation of having the most relevant search results, I did a quick comparison of what Bing believes to be the top search results and what Google believes to be most relevant. Click for image. I still believe Google to return the most relevant search results.
All in all I think Bing has done a great job; I especially like how I can drill down into certain areas like videos and images.
This takes me back to the days when I used to work closely with engineers. As a manager for a new web-based interface for a large telecommunications firm, there would often be some head-butting happening because the designers felt it was better for the end user to do it one way whereas the engineers logically would suggest another way because it was more efficient.
However, in all cases, the overall goal is to make the end user happy. This end-user appreciates the interface of Bing, but also appreciates the search results at Google. Maybe they should all just get together and then we, the end users would have the best of both worlds.