Microsoft Bing Search Launches Early Preview 310
An anonymous reader writes to mention that Microsoft has rolled out a preview version of their Bing Search site earlier than expected. Microsoft's hope at putting a dent in Google's ubiquitous search presence, Bing has several new features including Bing Cashback, Bing Video, and Bing xRank. "Bing Video is really great because of the new thumbnail video feature. Try searching for E3 at Bing Video and you'll quickly see how it works. Simply hover over a video and it starts playing instantly. This is fantastic from the consumer's point of view but what about the publisher? It's almost like Microsoft is stepping on their toes by deploying video search in this manner. Would a user still click on to the site if they can watch the whole video from within the search results? Fair use definitely comes into mind here. Perhaps there should be a 30second limitation on the 'thumbnail preview?'"
Re:Weird... (Score:4, Insightful)
I understand what you're saying, but I have a different perspective. Yes, the results page looks different to me but in fact that has meant I've paid more attention to it. I've been trying this out every so often and it's looking promising. Wish they'd get rid of the picture from the front page, but other than that I think I'm going to stick with this for a while. Its "Pages from the UK only" thing (insert your country here...) seems much more accurate than google.co.uk's, for instance. I might be imagining it, but it seems that way to me so far.
My current homepage is google.co.uk. I'm going to set bing.com as my homepage for a week to see how I get on with it - so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites, so looking promising at first glance. I'll see how it truly is after a longer term test.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Weird... (Score:3, Insightful)
I just tried Bing (Did Chandler approve of this?) and it does look like Google, with the exception of the left border as you state (and that weird mouseover line-with-a-dot on the right hand side)
Microsoft really did embrace (phase 1 of embrace, extend, extinguish) Google's format here... The same size font on result headings, the url (without the protocol identifier, in green) and even the "cached" link. And I don't think it looks bad, since many sites basically embed google site-search within their frame, as a quick and easy way of searching their site, and the results look similar to Bing.
That said, it does say a lot that Bing UI look just like Google's search UI embedded/framed within Bing's page... it isn't bad or good, but it does show that MSFT realizes they are NOT the big fish in the pond here, and that they are going for a low-profile look-alike entry so people aren't too scared off.
Re:Weird... (Score:3, Insightful)
so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites
Until the spammers note that Bing's marketshare is big enough to set their sights on. It's the whole exploits are concentrated on the most popular software out there paradigm again.
I do like some aspects (video included) of this though. I find the shopping to be about as good as Google's, nothing special. Could definitely do without the noisy background, though. I crave simplicity!
Yah. Just find the stuff I want you to find (Score:3, Insightful)
Clicking or hovering over a video is inane crap. Do the hard stuff please, it involves some rather advanced mathematics and shit load of computers, not flash/javascript.
Google are btw getting worse at finding the stuff I need, so there's an opening there.
Huge amount of text ads (Score:3, Insightful)
What first impress me is the huge amount of ads in the search results. Searching for "sql server [bing.com]" I can only see two real results before having to scroll the page and is hard to distinguish the ads on the top of the page, from the real results.
its all about the data (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice try! (Score:1, Insightful)
Somebody needs to take on Google (Score:2, Insightful)
It may as well be Microsoft. Right now, Google has no real competition.
Alta Vista (Score:3, Insightful)
Altavista was always good enough for me
I really liked Alta Vista also - when it supported boolean queries with the NEAR keyword. I really miss that NEAR keyword, it could transform a search so easily into something worthwhile. When Alta Vista morphed into a yet another Google-style search, I moved to Google.
Re:Weird... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bing, bong, binger, bang (Score:3, Insightful)
* The reponse from a Bing search: "Bong" (like 'Ping' and 'Pong')
* A person who searches on Bing: A binger (or is 'banger' a better word?)
* When referring to Bing search results in the past tense, it's a "Bang", like "Ring" and "Rang". Or maybe it's "Bung", like "Ring" and "Rung".
Hm... I didn't mean to make rude comments about Bing, but the name kind of lends itself to some bad nicknames.
Re:And Slashdot couldn't even link to it? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's one reason why I never liked MSN Live and other MS search products. They're obviously very biased towards Microsoft products. Google, if anything, is biased towards open source & their other offerings like gmail, etc. but their search results aren't so blatantly biased that way. I purposely don't want to use a search engine run by a corporation with a wide range of products and services like MS because it's so easy for them to game the results to suit their needs. That's why I stick with Google for most of my searching and venture out to others like ask.com, yahoo.com, etc. when I want to try something different. Unless MS can demonstrate that their searches aren't biased towards their products & services then I'll continue to avoid using them.
Who needs Bing? Google works. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bing's OK. But it's nothing special. Even if it's technically superior in certain ways to Google--I can't tell so I'll leave that for the intellectuals to tease out--there's no particular reason to switch.
I have NEVER had a problem finding stuff on Google. Usually what I'm looking for appears in the first 10 hits. About 10% of the time, I need to rephrase my search, or add some "-" keywords to weed out some signal noise. But Google does the job, I'm used to it, and it seems to just keep getting better.
There is so much power hidden inside Google's engine--stock quotes, mathematical calculations, language translation, mapping, document conversion, caches of deleted pages, paid links that I actually find useful, typo correction--the list goes on and on and on!
What can Microsoft's search engine add to this stunningly rich resource that millions of us can't live without? What killer features does Microsoft give us? Some little tweaks here and there in the UI that may or may not make much difference. Some good ideas on supplemental information such as the "related searches" column on the left.
Sorry, Microsoft, but Bing looks like MSN Search that's been tweaked a little. If Google didn't exist, you might have a winner on your hands, but this is just another "me, too" search system that will survive only as a niche product, funded by profits from the MS Office and Windows divisions.
Any market penetration by Bing will probably come from super-glueing it to the Windows 7 desktop and Windows mobile handhelds, defaulting it on IE searching, and otherwise forcing it down customers' throats in whatever way they can, hoping a large enough population will be ignorant enough to just use the defaults. But now that "google" is a verb in the dictionary, Microsoft has its work cut out for it to hold and expand its little piece of the search market.
Re:Life, The Universe, And Everything (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Weird... (Score:2, Insightful)
My take on it is this: If it defeats the SEO bullcrap that gums up the first 2-3 pages of most Google results, then I think it will be a useful tool to me.
SEO bullcrap= When I search for HP 4600 troubleshooting, I am not searching for:
"Tired of troubleshooting your old HP 4600? Come to CrazyJimbosPrinters.com and replace that HP 4600 and stop troubleshooting! HP HEWLETTPACKARD HP PRINTER 4600 4500 3500 2840 PRINTER LASERJET
I shouldn't have to make a "-$NOUN" string a mile long just to find pertinent information. If Bing cuts out some of this fat, then they have a new user.
Re:And Slashdot couldn't even link to it? (Score:4, Insightful)
This bias, built from MS's search seeing the world as highly MS-leaning from simply their own adherents using their products more, is somewhat self-defeating.
For popularity-driven ranks, the wider the audience and usage, the better the full audience will be able to make use of the statistics it employs. If MS's employees, contractors, proponents, vendors, etc are the primary users for the tool before a general web world, the stats will be be slanted towards MS's offerings, as you allude.
I would expect for a release as important as this to the MS portfolio, I would expect them to reset the statistics after the initial rollout, or even sub-sample the IP's, selecting for diversity, for the stats to fight bias. Without this, I can only wait until another set of "MS is just pushing more MS" posts across the blogosphere.
Then again, perhaps a healthy dose of bing-bombing (aka google-bombing) the site will re-skew it to those who fight such battles.
Re:First impressions (Score:1, Insightful)
It can be turned off if you really don't want to take the 80K hit. It has some search engine relevance in that there are hotspots in the image that link to various searches which is a nice way to explore. The image changes daily and is often topical in nature.
Re:And Slashdot couldn't even link to it? (Score:1, Insightful)
What's to prevent MS from skewing results so that...
How about the fact that they're competing against a search engine that doesn't do this, and that is already so favoured by pretty much everyone in the web-surfing world that their company name has even become a verb in internet lingo to describe the very act of searching the web.
Producing crappy results is not a good way to compete.