Microsoft’s Bing kicks Google’s behind

At the surface, Microsoft’s Bing may look like Google, but once you dig in a bit you notice a lot of nice little enhancements that make a huge diference.
I’ve only been using Bing for the last 2 hours and I’ve already decided it is my new favorite search engine. The search results look very similar to google’s, but Microsoft’s added a ton of little useful features. My favorite is the left sidebar with search history and related results. I also really like the pop-out details you get whenever you hover over any search result. The site is very ease to use, but obviously has a lot of deep complexity in its design; a lot of “spit and polish”. Small things you may not even notice, like how the image search’s counter (IMAGES;”>1-16 of 1,510,000 results) will update as you scroll – pretty nice little feature that I’ll miss if I ever go back to search images on Google.

If you agree that Bing is useful, you may get frustrated if you are a Mac user because you can not update your Safari search bar to default to Bing. Luckily, I found a helpful little utility and how-to that remedies the situation.

I know there may be a temptation to argue the quality of the results – that somehow google’s search algorithms are somehow better and more sophisticated. First, good luck with that discussion, the results I am receiving are just as good as I get from google for my “real world” use . Second, who really cares? There are countless studies from Forrester and Gartner that prove people value ease of use more than they value content. Bing has the “ease of use” thing down. It’s pretty ironic because Google beat out Mapqwest’s user experience years ago with Google Maps, but they failed to innovate in search UX and now have been leapfrogged by Microsoft.

It is obvious to me that Microsoft has a renewed focus on user experience. Thy are investing heavily in us (the end user) and that investment is truly paying off.

(http://anthonyfranco.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/microsofts-bing-kicks-googles-behind/)

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Microsoft's Bing is Now Mobile, Too

After launching Bing just a few days ago, Microsoft also just released a mobile version of its new search engine. Bing mobile generally works as well as Bing does on the desktop. It's a capable search engine, and Microsoft's focus on turning Bing into a 'decision engine' is even more apparent here than in the full browser version. This means, for example, that Bing Mobile will try to figure out if you are more likely to be interested in seeing recent news reports about a search term, or if you want to see a map.
Works Well - But Not Always
Generally, this works surprisingly well, and the ability to set your location often gives you good local results. At the same time, however, some searches that worked perfectly well on the main Bing site only gave horrificly bad results on the mobile site. A search for "Portland to Newark," for example, will give you results from Farecast on the main Bing site. The mobile version brought up a list of local businesses with the word 'Portland' in their name around Newark, NJ. Of course, Bing only launched a few days ago, so we expect Microsoft to fine-tune these results over time.
For the last few days, I've had Bing as my default search engine in Firefox. After using it for a while, and after adding a few Greasemonkey scripts to enhance its functionality, Bing has really shown that it is a very useful search engine. It is very hard to break the Google habit, however, and if I hadn't set Bing as the default search, I would have probably been heading over to Google instead.

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Microsoft's Bing search wins share from Google

LONDON/SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp's new Bing search engine gained U.S. market share in its first month in operation but still trails dominant rival Google Inc, according to data released on Wednesday.
Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter.
Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent.
Bing's share peaked in the first week of June at 9.21 percent, falling away in the middle two weeks before coming back at 8.45 percent in the last week of June.
The results may give heart to Microsoft, which is investing heavily in its loss-making online services business and is refusing to cede the market to Google.
"At first sight, a 1 percent increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive," StatCounter Chief Executive Adohan Cullen said in a statement.a
The world's largest software company may yet strike an online search partnership with Yahoo to make itself a credible competitor, but talk of such a deal has quietened down.
StatCounter, based in Dublin, says its data are based on 4 billion pageloads per month monitored through a network of websites. Other data research firms such as comScore are not expected to release figures on Bing's share until mid-July.
(Reporting by Bill Rigby and Georgina Prodhan; editing by Simon Jessop)

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