You may have seen the TV commercial for this thing by now. It starts out interestingly enough, with talk about how it is time to get liberated, with imagery of people doing different things, and what appears to be vacation spots that you may like to try and venues that you would like to see.
But it’s for Microsoft’s [MSFT] relaunched search service, Bing. Bing replaces Microsoft’s older Live Search offering, which in turn had replaced other previous Microsoft search products and aggregators.
Many people have voiced disappointment over the quality of Google’s [GOOG] search results, primarily too many results that are only peripherally related to what they are interested in and with very little differentiation in categorization. And then there’s the problem of too much search advertising that obstructs the searcher from the tasks at hand. Bing presents an interesting proposition: in addition to general search, more specific searches are available along the left sidebar of the “Explore” menu, which visually brings the user experience a bit closer to the image that dominates the center of the display area… which in turn attracts the attention toward the hover hotspots that offer a nice meandering around the presented contextual data about the image. Of course, this would position Bing as a casual-visiting site because of the meander feature, which may dilute the intention of the current marketing. But while the hover technique (AJAX-y, eh?) is something that has existed in other Microsoft products before, applying it for search result drilling is vastly more appropriate than some of the past uses.
Whether Bing provides a better search experience is still not known, since people have to get their eyeballs on the revamped service and learn a bit about the history of the service. But if this provides another alternative to Google and Yahoo [YHOO] search engines, then it’s a case of “the more, the merrier”. Unfortunately, Microsoft does still have to break away from excessive Silverlight usage: after all, the objective should be to make Bing more accessible to the public, not less accessible.
More Reading
- Bing (Wikipedia)
- Companion site about Bing itself : Be careful of the embedded video plugin and Silverlight requirement complaint popups! But it goes over some of the reasons behind the search engine’s overhaul and its history.
- Bing search challenge : See how Bing compares against Google Search, on the same Web page.
- Bing Developer Blog : Of course, we knew you’d want to know about this destination! After all, how are you going to integrate Live Search/Bing into your own apps?
- Bing’s search results about “Bing”
- Bing on Twitter : You didn’t think Microsoft would miss the Twitter opportunity, did you?
