Mixed reviews of Bing, Microsoft's new search engine

Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, has finally launched in the UK, albeit in Beta, ahead of the official roll-out on June 3. We round up a selection of the most insightful reviews of the service hoping to take on Google.

There are a few pretty good things about Bing, mostly from a usability perspective. Firstly it offers more information at the hands of users without being too cluttered. Secondly, Bing adds different iterations of keyword phrases to make searching easier. I like that a lot as the way we search is becoming relatively specific. If you're looking for an iPhone for example it makes it easy to find iPhone apps and iPhone games.

Bing also lets you see some content before you actually click-through. It's like Ask.com but a little less annoying. I hate pop-up features usually but this looks pretty useful. One of the good things is that they have a team of 60 engineers building it for Britain and it looks a lot fresher than Live Search (Bing's predecessor).”

Andy Mihalop, head of search, i-level, Revolution magazine

“When I saw it it was very much from a consumer perspective and was really impressive. It's different from the typical search journey you get on Google as the search engine refines the search as you go. This will make people find results quicker as Google Suggest is not as intuitive. From that perspective it's a step forward.”

Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor, TechCrunch

“My thoughts on Bing: I like it. And I’d consider using it as my search engine. But like many people I’m used to Google and I know how to find the things I’m looking for. Bing returns very different results for a lot of queries, which is great. But it also means spending time learning how to use Bing to get what you need out of it. I’ll spend that time because it’s my job. But for most people, they’ll stick to what they know, and that’s Google….

I’ll sum up with this - whether Microsoft ultimately succeeds or not in “winning” the search war, the competition is very good for the rest of the Internet. Google needs to be pushed to try innovating new things.”

Negative reviews:

PC Advisor

“Bing’s new look focuses on a lefthand navigation menu called the Explorer Pane. This extra column of content includes Quick Tabs that break searches down into Web Groups relevant to your search.

Our take: The Explorer Pane can be extremely useful, which may make the trade-off of cluttering up the search results page worthwhile. But in our initial tests, Quick Tabs often steered me to Microsoft services such as Bing Shopping, Bing Travel, MSN Autos, and Bing health information.

It may be that those Bing sites offer the best content, but we get suspicious of any search engine that habitually gives its own links precedence over others.”

Ryan Singel, San Francisco-based blogger and contributor to Wired.com

“We discovered Bing does much more than search for relevant links. It retrieves and processes data, and renders it smartly. That makes finding a great restaurant or an airline ticket, a snap.

But the service is far from perfect. Beautiful data mash-ups coexist side-by-side with perplexing interface choices that make it hard to find the best features. Meanwhile, actual search results were inaccurate in some cases, and disappointing overall in the local search category, one of the areas Microsoft hopes to make its biggest splash.”

Plugged.in

“Bing: What hasn’t worked well so far?

xRank – a technology that keeps track of notable people and puts them in order for you.

MS counts Live Search web searches for movie stars, musicians, and other famous people and then compiles its findings into an insightful ranking formula that tells you who the world is searching for most. The result is a cultural snapshot of who’s hot and who’s not!

xRank works well for US focused queries, but not otherwise (maybe, global launch of this feature should have been held, unless MS had collected substantial data)

While it’s too early to say Bing is better than Google or not, it surely will eat into other’s pie.”

By Emma Barnett, Technology and Digital Media Correspondent
Published: 12:58PM BST 01 Jun 2009