Bing is the beginning of Search 2.0

Bing is better than Live Search. That’s for sure. But will it be able to take market share from Google or Yahoo? That’s the question. Up to now Bing has around 8% of the market share according to Compete. But the major chunk of that is from the Live Search and MSN Search redirections. Only time will tell if this interest is going to stay and convert into loyal visitors or not.  Lets see how it pans out against the big Google. That will give an idea if they are really gonna stay or this is another MS blunder.

Look:- While Google prefers the clean uncluttered look, Microsoft is taking this in another direction as you can see below.

bing

Bing is preferring a wallpapered background with a new image every day. Though it looks good but still the community is divided on this. Some like me prefer this nice interface while some find this annoying as they want to search and this increases page load time a little. Bing gets the benefit of doubt in this criterion.

Speed:- We want search to be fast. And Bing does that very well. Despite its Search 2.0 look I must admit that it delivers results very fast and even faster than Google. I have an alternate 48 kbps line and Bing loads quick on that too. This is one of the biggest plus of Bing over Google.

Web Search- The ultimate work of a Search Engine is Web Search. There is a very hand tool for comparing Google and Bing search here. On doing a lot of searches I can assure you that its better and way better than live search. Those who claim that the index and search are same are wrong. I have seen that many sites indexed in live are not there in Bing. BUT it is still not as good as Google. Thats a fact. Though it is on par with Google in broad terms but the depth of indexing is lacking and there are innumerable sites which are indexed on Google but not on Bing. Seems that MSNBot is lazy than its Google counterpart.:) But its still a great improvement over Live Search and if you are not into very narrow terms, Bing is cool.

Also, Bing makes a list of related searches on the left. What more, if you type in some important name Bing automatically gives you the Address and Contact. Type British Airways and see it work. Again Search a major baseball player and Bing brings you his average for the last 3 matches.

But the most handy feature of Bing is the preview function. Its a nice hover feature that gives you snippets of the pages in search results and also other links on that page. Well done Microsoft. Thus we can say that for average users Bing is good but Google still rules the roost. Bing has nice functions but needs to deliver a little better results.

Image and Video Search- This is the stronghold of Bing. Unlike Google, all the images are loaded in the same page to save you time and the get a little bigger if you hover the mouse over them. And the relevancy is also very good. Bing pulls in news videos related to your search query. And you don’t have to leave a page to view the video. Just hover the mouse and it starts playing. But this also uses up useless bandwidth so i hope they make some options to disable it if we like. Also there has been criticism that auto play is giving users access to undesired video below age level. On the other hand, Bing is very good is censoring certain words for India and countries where law dictates so. I am very happy that MS did this and hope Google also does this.

Travel:- Bing’s travel search is very good but limited only to US for now. Recently Microsoft had acquired Farecast and is providing a nice intuitive forecast about Air Fares is being provided by them. You can get to know when the fare rates will be low and this one is pretty useful IMO.

Shopping:- Bing Shopping is what that takes it towards being the decision engine it claims to be. As you type in a query and press search Bing does a lot. It gathers product review excerpts from different sites and actually rates products based on its algorithm and the reviews. It also gathers data about its price on different sites and arranges them in a tabular mode. And there is also the “Bing Cashback” which to be fair I never preferred with Live due to higher prices. Also you get all the features of the product on Bing itself. Bing shopping really saves a lot of time compared to any other Search Engine and really helps in taking decisions.

Maps- Its just okay and no dramatic improvement in my eyes in this thing. Google Maps are way better according to me.

Health- This is another niche that Bing is giving specialized results on. It gathers a lot of excerpts of health related articles related to your query and also classifies them. On the right it gives links to sponsored heath programs with a brief introduction and get started button.

News:- This is another sector Bing needs much improvement. The result are below par and you are far better using Yahoo! News or Google for now at least.

Flaws:- Though Bing is new but it is very bad in reading typos. Simple typos are not rectified by them where as Google most of the times anticipates what you really wanted to search as asks you about it. Bing better make this right. Also in spite of its new features, its still not as good as Google in giving Web Search results.

So What’s the Verdict:- I guess this is a tactical move by Microsoft to capture the revenue generating markets like shopping, travel and get the money out of them. Brainy, isn’t it? Lets see how they fare. One thing I will tell you is that if you really want to test Bing in a fair way, then make it your default Search Engine for a week and don’t look elsewhere. For others (me too), Google is still the way but I will use Bing once in a while to check the improvements. Competition is always good for us, the users. But even if Bing takes some share from Google, they still have Adwords and Adsense and Microsoft has a long way to go to get even near Google.

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