Microsoft (MS), quite frankly, gets a lot of grief in the inter­net world.  Some­times it’s fair (I never like MSN, for example, from way back in the mid nineties) and often a little unfair.

But Live Search simply wasn’t up to the job.  It didn’t work well.  And I know that people that found IE default­ing to it would either work out how to change it, or simply type Google.com into the address bar.  In other words, many tried it, but it didn’t find the answers they wanted.  The algorithm has been slowly improved with time, but the dam­age was done.  MS knew they had to relaunch.

Bing, they felt, was the answer.  And in some ways, it’s a bet­ter and more pro­duct­ive tool than Google:

Bing — pretty pic­tures to cheer you up

1. It’s Prettier

While I’ve heard many ques­tion the func­tion of the land­ing page photo, I per­son­ally really like it.  It’s attract­ive, well designed, and brings a little bit of beauty into the day.  You can’t sit and surf pretty images at work, so if they’re there as part of the ‘wall­pa­per’ of a daily tool then that’s a lift we all need.

2. Infin­ite Image Search

The infin­ite scroll facil­ity of the image search makes it a quicker tool to use.  Chunking of text related searches makes sense, because we can scan a page rel­at­ively slowly, but with images the human eye can scan a huge amount of visual inform­a­tion incred­ibly quickly which means that Bing’s con­stantly scrolling visual tool is way ahead of Google’s image search.

3. Video Pre­view­ing on Video Search

Bing Video — con­tent owner’s night­mare or benefit?

Search­ing for video con­tent can often be a slow and pain­ful pro­cess.  In Bing, when you get a series of videos up on screen you can simply hover your mouse pointer over a video to pre­view the first 30s and get a feel for the video, rather than vis­it­ing the site and wait­ing for a slow load.  The pre­views are poor qual­ity, in order to get quick load­ing, but they’re good enough.  I feel this is one of Bing’s most effect­ive innovations.

One thing where they may struggle is that if you click the video and that video has an embed option, you get it on the Bing site, rather than going through to the source site.  So a You­Tube video search res­ult doesn’t send you off to You­Tube.  Con­tent own­ers may not like this.

4. Site Preview

When you hover over a search res­ult, you’ll see a small orange marker appear over to the right.  Hover over that and up pops a pre­view of the con­tent you’re look­ing for.  Again, saves a wasted visit as it lets you scan a little bit of con­tent for rel­ev­ance — some­thing that’s quicker this way than click­ing on yet another unne­ces­sary site.

5. It’s Not Google

Bing is, pur­portedly, a recurs­ive acronym that means Bing Is Not Google.  But there’s some­thing import­ant in that — Microsoft is a highly prof­it­able, focussed com­pany that has the resources to provide an altern­at­ive to Google.  This is import­ant — without solid com­pet­i­tion Google will cease to innov­ate appro­pri­ately.  MS suffered a sim­ilar fate on the desktop — they were too dom­in­ant and rivals couldn’t com­pete.  Apple’s OS9 was dread­fully dated when sat next to a Win­dows machine of the same era, yet Win­dows had sig­ni­fic­ant flaws.  It’s only lately with Win­dows 7 that MS have really star­ted to get their act together prop­erly — because OSX finally gave it some decent com­pet­i­tion in cer­tain sectors.

When you start see­ing art­icles on how to change from Google to Bing on Fire­fox, you know something’s happened.

It Can Get Better

Microsoft Sead­ragon, with it’s deep zoom and mobile cap­ab­il­it­ies, and Pho­to­synth tech­no­lo­gies could be tied into the image search, for example.  As cheap pro­cessing power expands and more and more images are geot­agged, this could form an aston­ish­ing visual search cap­ab­il­ity.  A shame it won’t be coupled with Google Street View — ima­gine what that could be like?

Search is going to become more rel­ev­ant and more power­ful with time.  Developers (our own Inter­con­nect IT included) are busy cre­at­ing a lot of power­ful geo­coded data­bases which will allow for some amaz­ing mashups.  If Google and MS start fight­ing for dom­in­ance in this space the oppor­tun­it­ies for users and inform­a­tion sup­pli­ers are vast.  Are you look­ing into it?

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