Today, Microsoft have just relaunched their latest addition to the search space, Bing. They tout it as a serious competitor to Google but then, we’ve heard it all before with Live search. However since that launch MS have acquired Powerset with an aim to integrating natural language features (and wikipedia data mining) into Live Search. Bing is the result.
Microsoft are marketing Bing, not as a search engine as such, but instead as a decision engine. Wolfram Alpha yes. That’s a decision engine. Bing. Not so much. To me it’s yet another clutch at straws and smells of competitive insecurities. The main part of the decision engine appears to have been implemented as predictive search – a feature Google rolled out from labs to the main engine some time ago.
Feature Set
The feature set is as you would expect pretty similar to what Live.com was With a few added extras. Firstly, one of things I noticed was that it offers RSS results. Hooray for anyone looking to build an application from the results in any way, and if you are into brand monitoring and reputation management, RSS will be a welcome addition. Although you can (with a bit of work) do the same thing in Google, this is much more transparent and offers a good bit more scope.
SiteLinks for Strong Domains
Microsoft have also implemented one word results for domains which are particularly strong. Try doing a search for something like “Digg” and you’ll get sitelinks and one result. I’m not sure if this is a clever move or not, I guess it will take more refined search terms such as “Microsoft finances” to get a deep search down into the particular domain in question.
To see who and what everyone’s searching for most, in comparison to Google’s QDF algorithm, Bing offers xRank. See more here on the documentation for XRank. If you are a bit of a celebrity hunter or fancy yourself as the next Periz Hilton, Bing’s XRank browses the web for recent hot topics on certain people. Incidentally, as I was writing this article I did a quick check for the term “celebrity blogger” on both engines. Periz Hilton came top on Google. Bing got it way wrong – and brought back a Myspace result as first. Not good.
Shopping Searches
A shopping search on Bing brings you off site to ciao.co.uk – another MS owned web property filled to the brim with adverts. Google shopping search trumps this site ten times over – and will continue to do so until MS integrate inline shopping results algorithmically into their engine.
Image Searches
Something I was however impressed a bit more was image search. It seems as good if not better at bringing back relevant images for my terms. See below screenshot for Google:
Overall
Overall Bing seems like another rushed job. With Wolfram offering something different than Google, and the already failed attempts of Live search to impress. Bing really had it all to do. Algorithmically, from what I can see it is Live search, with a few bolt ons that really make no dent in Google’s dominant position in search. And you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.
linky
posted:June 1, 2009 5:30 pm
I have tried it a few times and its ok, to be honest it seems that all search engines are about the same, each one has its own things I like but for the most part I use google and yahoo. I will though try this one out for a while before I say one way or another as to if I like it or not.
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