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

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Microsoft’s ‘Bing’ Search Engine Debuts, But It’s No Google

Microsoft’s revamped search offering — known as “Bing” — has gone live. In fact, Bing is now the default Live.com homepage.

We know what you’re thinking: Does the world need another confusingly-branded search engine? But horrible name and questionable graphics aside (Hot air balloons? Seriously?) Bing actually isn’t that bad of a search engine.

The problem is that Bing doesn’t really offer any compelling advantage over Google.

Bing is fast, offers a minimalist results page (which looks just like Google’s results, but with a bit more filtering/subsearch options in the left-hand sidebar), and acceptable, though not stellar, results. There’s not much more to it.

In general, Bing’s results were a bit outdated compared to similar searches preformed on Google, and Bing often lacks the helpful inner-page links that Google offers for large, popular websites.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been trumpeting Bing as a better solution for shopping searches, trip planning, health care queries and finding a local business.

From our testing, while Bing is able to deliver acceptable results for most of those use cases, there is again, nothing major that sets it apart from Google.

There are some niceties. Like, when you’re searching for shopping results, Bing carries over Live.com’s cashback offers. The links now say, ‘Bing Cashback,” but are otherwise the same. Also, search results are accompanied by the standard short page descriptions we’ve come to expect, but if that’s not enough information for you, hover your mouse over the search result. You’ll see a small box pop up that provides even more in-depth info. The nice thing is that Bing gives you a preview of the content of the page itself, rather than just relying on the meta description. It’s not entirely new, but it’s a helpful feature.

Another place Bing offers you something you won’t find on Google is within video searches. Bing lets you watch short previews of videos (including results from Hulu). To see it in action just search for an episode of your favorite show using Bing Videos and then hover the mouse over any of the video thumbnails to watch a short clip. Beware though, the clips will auto-play and don’t always stop when you roll off them, which could make for some potentially awkward moments depending on what sort of video you’re searching for.

While Bing is definitely Microsoft’s most impressive search engine to date, it still lacks anything game-changing enough to make us switch away from Google...

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Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results

Let’s just get it out of the way: no, Bing is not a “Google Killer.” It’s also safe to say that Microsoft doesn’t see it that way either. My understanding of what Microsoft believes it has in Bing is a much more competitive product than Live Search. I entirely agree.

Over the course of the next two or three weeks there will be countless articles and blog posts discussing Bing and whether or not it can dethrone Google. Microsoft has told me that the company sees Bing as a start (or restart) and that improvements will continue to roll out over time. One can be skeptical of that position or not. Regardless, Bing is a big advancement for Microsoft’s search efforts.
I’ve been using Bing (Kumo) off and on over that past couple of weeks. I’ve used it side by side with Google and by itself. In some cases I’ve been self-consciously testing and comparing results. At other times, I’ve simply used it to find information or navigate to desired sites.

Let me say that this post is not intended to be a detailed discussion of Bing’s “anatomy” and features. Danny and others will delve into those areas and may express different opinions and conclusions than I do here. As an aside, there are range of features that I like quite a bit; among them the “table of contents” that often appears in the upper left column (see graphic below) and the easily accessible search history, which will likely be further developed in interesting ways. (A Silverlight-enhanced version of search history adds more utility and even makes it social.)
My overall assessment is very positive. Kumo, now Bing, has performed well and I’ve been satisfied with the results. There haven’t been any significant deficiencies or missing links (so to speak). While there have been a few occasions where I’ve found Google results to be better, the substantial gap that existed between Google and Live Search is largely gone with Bing.

Microsoft has integrated the Powerset technology to varying degrees and made numerous algorithmic improvements on the “back end” that are largely opaque to me. More obvious are the interface upgrades and changes. While many people are accustomed — even habituated — to the Google UI, I appreciated the often richer visual presentation and generally “cleaner” organization of Bing SERPs.

So now you’re probably thinking will I start using Bing instead of Google?

To be candid I don’t see myself giving up Google, especially given the default Firefox browser integration. But I can also honestly say that while I almost never used Live Search except to write about it, I will indeed use Bing. Unfortunately you won’t be able to try it for yourself until next week when it goes live.

I cannot predict how you or others will react or whether Microsoft’s reportedly massive ad campaign for Bing will drive adoption. Advertising can generate awareness or curiosity but that’s about it. The bottom line is whether people find the results and their presentation to be compelling enough to actually use Bing.

So to provide a more concrete sense of Bing in advance of the launch, I conducted a range of basic searches that one might do in a given week and captured screens from both Google and Bing to offer a visual side-by-side comparison. The following are the queries that I used:

* Bing (couldn’t resist)
* Sonia Sotomayor
* George Clooney
* Hotels, New York
* Playoffs (NBA)
* Prius
* Up (the movie)
* United Airlines
* Best sushi los angeles

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Microsoft Unveils Bing Travel

Bing Travel helps consumers make smart travel decisions with flight and hotel search, airfare price predictions, travel news and community, travel deals, and more

REDMOND, Wash. — June 4, 2009 — Microsoft Corp. today announced consumer availability of a new search destination for travelers — Bing Travel — which will help consumers make smart travel decisions through a variety of innovative tools and features. Bing Travel is part of Bing, Microsoft’s new Decision Engine and consumer brand announced on May 28, designed to help people overcome search overload and make faster, more informed decisions when searching online. Bing Travel combines many of the airfare and hotel tools from Microsoft’s 2008 acquisition of Farecast with rich news and editorial content from MSN Travel. Bing Travel is available for travelers today at http://www.bing.com/travel.

According to a recent survey by Bing Travel, 52 percent of potential travelers search three or more sites before booking their airfare. Forty-two percent of travelers spend between one and four weeks weighing their travel options, and 17 percent spend more than one month. Bing Travel aims to dramatically reduce the amount of time consumers spend searching for travel information by presenting comprehensive results in one place, and to help consumers make more informed decisions with tools such as Price Predictor and Rate Indicator.

“Bing Travel has a simple goal: help people make smarter, more informed decisions regarding travel,” said Hugh Crean, general manager of Bing Travel. “Travelers face plenty of challenges — from airport security and luggage restrictions to finding their hotel in an unknown city or trying to speak a foreign language. Researching and booking travel should be simple and easy, and now Bing Travel is here to help.”

Microsoft research shows that 45 percent of people use a search engine to select a flight or hotel. Bing Travel provides new, innovative travel answers within the Bing search experience. Starting today, people searching on Bing for hotels in a given city with a search such as “Vegas hotels” will get Bing Travel Instant Answers included directly in search results, featuring the Rate Indicator, which helps people choose the right hotel.

Some of Bing Travel’s key features include the following:

•	Price Predictor. Bing Travel uses Farecast technology to analyze more than 175 billion airfare observations and predict whether the price of a flight is going up or down. It offers people a recommendation of “Buy Now” or “Wait,” including a confidence level and expected price increase or decrease over the next seven days.
•	Rate Indicator. How does someone know if the rate for a hotel is a deal or not? The Rate Indicator analyzes historical rate data from thousands of hotels to determine whether the current price is a good deal, or not a deal at all. People can view a city map with details for each hotel, color coded by Rate Indicator data.
•	Travel Deals. Bing Travel features up-to-the-minute flight and hotel deals for nearly 40 cities around the world. When people choose their origin city, Bing Travel will show the best airfare and hotel deals it has and will even show them why particular flights are considered deals. For example, people will see that flights to certain destinations may be a record low, or more than $150 less than the average for a particular route. People can be sure that all Travel Deals are based strictly on science, not marketing.
•	Comparison Flight & Hotel Search. Bing Travel makes it fast and easy for consumers to get flight and hotel results and pricing for thousands of destinations worldwide. Finding the right flight or hotel is made simple with tools that allow people to refine results: nonstop flights only, specific airlines, hotels within a mile of an address, and many more. After selecting the hotel or flight, Bing Travel makes booking directly with suppliers or agencies seamless.
•	Fare Alerts. Most airfare price drops last less than 48 hours, so people need to be ready to jump when a fare falls. Fare Alerts will notify people if the fares for their trips drop, allowing them to catch lower fares.
•	Original travel editorial content. The new Bing Travel combines editorial content from MSN Travel and Farecast to create an in-house team of experts who write daily articles, features, slide shows and blog posts to inspire and educate travelers on destinations, travel news, tips and tricks. Bing Travel also features exclusive editorial content from some of the world’s biggest names in travel, including Peter Greenberg and Pauline Frommer. Bing Travel also licenses content from leading publications such as Travel + Leisure, Budget Travel Inc. and The Wall Street Journal.

Bing Travel Summer Forecast Update

Bing Travel launches at a time when consumers can find significant deals on travel. The “Fareologists” at Bing Travel report that this summer — June through August — airfare is down 23 percent over this time last year, and similarly premium domestic U.S. hotel rates are down 16 percent on average, and as much as 33 percent in some cities. A recent survey by Bing Travel revealed that 55 percent of Americans plan to take a summer trip. Of those planning to skip a vacation this summer, 59 percent cited the recession or money woes as their chief reason.

“We know that a summer vacation isn’t an option for everyone this year, but for those with even a modest travel budget, it will go a long way this year,” said Joel Grus, Bing Travel Fareologist. “We also encourage people to shift how they think about a summer vacation. Instead of flying to Mexico or Hawaii, consider taking advantage of incredibly low hotel rates in a city nearby. Anyone who is creative, flexible and a little savvy can find a trip to fit almost any budget.”

About Bing Travel

Bing Travel launched in June 2009 to help consumers make smart travel decisions. In addition to comprehensive flight and hotel search, Bing Travel leverages Farecast technology to provide airfare Price Predictors and hotel Rate Indicators. The Farecast technology was recognized as the 2008 Webby Award Travel category winner, named Condé Nast Traveler’s “Best Site for Knowing When to Book” in 2008, named one of Travel + Leisure’s Top 25 Travel Websites in 2007, awarded Budget Travel’s 2007 Extra Mile Award, named one of PC World’s 20 Most Innovative Products for 2006, listed in “Best of What’s New 2006” by Popular Science, named one of Time Magazine’s “50 Coolest Websites” in 2006, and named one of the “Best Trip Planning Tools” by BusinessWeek readers in 2006. Visit Bing Travel at http://bing.com/travel or follow the Bing Travel Fareologists on Twitter at http://twitter.com/fareologist.

About Bing

Bing is designed to help people overcome search overload and make faster, more informed decisions when searching online. No longer satisfied with the status quo of search, Microsoft designed Bing as a Decision Engine to provide people with intelligent search tools to help them simplify tasks and make more informed decisions, from simple decisions such as choosing the fastest route to get home to more complex ones such as researching a product purchase or planning a trip. Bing is available at http://bing.com.

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Microsoft’s New Search at Bing.com Helps People Make Better Decisions

Technorati Profile

Decision Engine goes beyond search to help customers deal with information overload

REDMOND, Wash. — May 28, 2009 — Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Bing, a new Decision Engine and consumer brand, providing customers with a first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions. Bing is specifically designed to build on the benefits of today’s search engines but begins to move beyond this experience with a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.

The result of this new approach is an important beginning for a new and more powerful kind of search service, which Microsoft is calling a Decision Engine, designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions. The new service, located at http://www.Bing.com, will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, June 3.

The explosive growth of online content has continued unabated, and Bing was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload that has come to characterize many of today’s search experiences. Results from a custom comScore Inc. study across core search engines show that as many as 30 percent of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result. The data also showed that approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or requery on the search results page.

“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

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History of Bing

MSN Search
MSN Search homepage in 2006

MSN Search was a search engine by Microsoft that comprised a search engine, index, and web crawler. MSN Search first launched in the fall of 1998 and used search results from Inktomi. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. Since then Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own Microsoft-built search engine results (list of web addresses with samples of content that meet a user's query), the index of which is updated weekly or even daily. The upgrade started as a beta program in November 2004 (based on several years of research), and came out of beta in February 2005. Image search was powered by a third party, Picsearch. The service also started providing its search results to other search engine portals in an effort to better compete in the market.


Windows Live Search
Windows Live Search homepage

The first public beta of Windows Live Search was unveiled on March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006 replacing MSN Search. The new search engine offered users the ability to search for specific types of information using search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and Microsoft Encarta. Windows Live Search aimed to make its over 2.5 billion worldwide queries each month "more useful by providing consumers with improved access to information and more precise answers to their questions." A configuration menu is available to change the default search engine in Internet Explorer.

In the roll-over from MSN Search to Windows Live Search, Microsoft stopped using Picsearch as their image search provider and started performing their own image search, fueled by their own internal image search algorithms.



Live Search
Live Search homepage

On March 21, 2007, it was announced that Microsoft would separate its search developments from the Windows Live services family, rebranding the service to Live Search. Live Search was integrated into the Live Search and Ad Platform headed by Satya Nadella, part of Microsoft's Platform and Systems division. As part of this change, Live Search was consolidated with Microsoft adCenter.

A series of reorganisations and consolidations of Microsoft's search offerings was made under the Live Search branding. On May 23, 2008, Microsoft announced the discontinuation of Live Search Books and Live Search Academic and integrated all academic and book search results into regular search, and as a result this also included the closure of Live Search Books Publisher Program. Soon after, Windows Live Expo was discontinued on July 31, 2008. Live Search Macros, a service which allowed users to create their own custom search engines or use macros created by other users, was also discontinued shortly after. On May 15, 2009, Live Product Upload, a service which allowed merchants to upload products information onto Live Search Products, was discontinued. The final reorganisation came as Live Search QnA was rebranded as MSN QnA on February 18, 2009, however, it was subsequently discontinued on May 21, 2009.

Microsoft recognised that there would be a brand issue as long as the word "Live" remained in the brand.[11] As an effort to create a new identity for Microsoft's search services, Live Search was officially replaced by Bing on June 3, 2009

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What is Bing

Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search), codenamed Kumo, is a web search engine and is currently the second largest search engine on the web at 16%, after its competitor Google at 60%, according to the web analytics firm StatCounter and CNBC.[1] Unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009 at the All Things D conference in San Diego, Bing is a replacement for Live Search; it went fully online on June 3, 2009.[2]

Notable changes include the addition of search suggestions as you type and related searches (called "Explorer pane" on the left side of search results), based on semantic technology from PowerSet[3] which Microsoft purchased in 2008.[4] Bing also includes the ability to Save & Share search histories via Windows Live SkyDrive, Facebook, and e-mail.

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Introducing Microsoft Bing

You probably didn’t wake up today expecting an entirely new search experience.

But – Bing! – here it is.

So, why a new search engine? Why the new name? Why now?

Well, because even though search is a pretty amazing thing, the current state of search engines has some equally amazing statistics.

So far in 2009, there are four and a half websites created EVERY SECOND as the web continues to expand. While more searchable information is cool, nearly half of all searches don’t result in the answer that people are seeking.

At the same time, the way the world searches is changing. You want more than just information. You want knowledge that leads to action.

The truth is you’ve evolved. It’s time search caught up.

So we had an idea. Start over. And we did.

We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster.

And features like cashback, where we actually give you money back on great products, and Price Predictor, which actually tells you when to buy an airline ticket in order to help get you the best price – help you make smarter decisions, and put money back in your pocket.

We sincerely hope that the next time you need to make an important decision, you’ll Bing and decide.

Thank you,
Bing Team, Microsoft

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