The search results seem like pretty much the same as they have been for years. This is just a rebranding and some UI fluff as far as I can see. So yeah, it's day 1 for the new UI, but I was talking about quality of search results.
Microsoft has done exactly this several times. They won through superior business models, which made nearly as good better for their purposes. (Unless, of course, you include the business model as part of being better than the competition, in which case your statement is trivially true.)
I don't know if Microsoft has ideas for beating Google in the business model arena, but I wouldn't put it past them.
I noticed something interesting. When I searched for "google" it displayed _only_ google's homepage (there was a link below it to display similar results). I tried searching google for "bing" and "yahoo" and google shows the primary result in a highlight at the top of the page.
I dunno. In some ways, bing seems more aesthetically pleasing than google. I really liked the infinite image scroll as some others have mentioned.
Yeah, it's exactly the same results as from Live. No wonder they are spending $100 Million to advertise it. From what I have seen of it thus far, it's the same old search with a new url and a new skin.
The core algorithm is the same as Live's, but there is more to a search engine than ten blue links. Did the marketing actually say it was a whole new algorithm/indexer?
It'll be interesting to see if the extraneous features catch on or not. The treatment of large companies is nice: http://www.bing.com/search?q=fry%27s
Well, .. I'll give it a second look. Maybe they know it'll take $100 Million to explain why it is better to people, including me. I can accept that possibility.
Getting people to seriously try a new search engine does take some work. The $100 million is probably an attempt to overcome the branding effect described in this article a week ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626960
Hm. The nebula and color gradients feel unnecessary to me, but I think there's potential for innovation in having the recommended searches prominently located on the left sidebar - provided that the recommendations are intelligent enough.
I've thought on more than one occasion while burrowing down with repeated queries that search should involve more of the machine prompting me and less of me guessing at the right keywords. Bing's UI promotes that behavior, whereas my eyes just skip over the recommended queries at the bottom of Google.
I personally like the way they integrated the "advanced" search box in the results page. It actually makes it easy to do an advanced search. Neither Yahoo nor Google has this.
Combined with the impressive speed, I think it stands a chance.
Bing makes the advanced search "clickable" but always in your face.
Google gives you the advanced search options pane, and then shows you how to format your search query so you can create the advanced search on-the-fly next time (such as by adding -, +, quotes and the like), as they see the command-line interface to their search as superior.
the homepage is nasty, and the search results page looks like the default spam 'search' page a domain squatter uses. the hover-triggered contexts, though, are pretty fantastic.
I've been surprised how many people say it looks nice. I completely agree with your statement. It looks straight from those fake search results on domains. I thought the homepage was pretty weak too.
Logo is well and truly terrible. It communicates nothing and belongs on a the sign of a crappy downtown bistro than a professional web app.
Functionally it's disappointing. The context and use case-sensitive thing that is hinted at in the preview video seems almost entirely absent. The preview vid suggested that they will aggregate hotel information, flight information, etc, to create a grander unified experience - I have not seen any of this. Searching for hotels in a city doesn't give me anything except your traditional search results.
The categories are well thought out - but undifferentiated from Google's search term suggestions as it is.
Sadly, this launch seems a bit like the cuil launch - functionally incomplete, but in the web world you really only get one launch.
For me, the irritation is the panther thingy in the background on search results. It just looks like someone with no design sense found some clip art and decided to put it there.
I didn't understand your comment until I enabled Javascript for the occasion and found that they use photos. And corny ones, too; I'm looking at "Hot air ballons over Cappadocia" (I still don't get the "panther thingy"; maybe because I'm in Germany). Makes no sense at all to me - why would they want to do that?
I'm actually thinking there's room there to make UI improvements that would benefit the user.
For example, with the live id and being logged in, I think it would be neat if these background images eventually ended up being something relevant to me rather than something generic.
Right now, there is definitely room for improvement, but I wouldn't say it's downright bad.
It's not spectacular - but (to me anyway) it communicates a cutesy friendliness - the squiggly fonts and child-like primary colors gives a sense of invitation to poke and pry at the system's abilities, and also conveys a sense of wonder.
The bing logo, on the other hand... the font is poorly chosen, IMHO the kerning is all wrong, it feels like something one would whip up in 10 minutes in Paint, not a professional logo. Furthermore, the choices of font gives me the feeling that they're trying to position this thing as hip and cool (hence the bistro comment), where the system is, as of yet, deserving of none such accolades.
Microsoft's cash coffers give it a few exceptions to the "only one launch" rule. Cuil's total funding of $33M (crunchbase) is a third of Microsoft's marketing budget for Bing.
Searched favorite obscure techno band. Returned Obscure Band homepage. Compare Google: returns wikipedia page. Damn, everything I love is going mainstream. Anyway, mildly impressed. Click top Bing result. Dead link. Accept Google's suggestion. Redirected to actual live page. The end.
PS: My girlfriend asked if it they called it 'bing' because it makes a 'bing' noise when you search. I laughed but then I thought this would be amusing. Anybody know how would I set about doing such a thing? I'm not a web coder.
I'm in Australia, but using the 'show all' results (not the 'only from Australia' option), and freesound.org is #11. #1 is wiki.creativecommons.org/Free_Sound_Effects_and_Loops
With market set to Australia, the logo says 'bing Beta'. It says 'bing preview' for the US. I guess it's not fully baked for non-US markets. I wonder if the advertising campaign is restricted to the US?
I see 5 results from creativecommons.org as the top in bing, but thats as an Australian. When you switch it to US, its freesound. Even as US bing shows 3 results from dvguru that appear to be spam. It also shows 3 results from creativecommons, 2 of which appear to be somewhat un-useful, and the 1 other useful one appears on both google and bing.
I'd definitely call that search a win for google. There are far more useful sources of creative commons sound effects in google's first page.
it isn't intuitively different from Google, and that is a disappointment.
I understand that they have done a bunch of UI stuff which is supposed to make it a better search service, but what exactly are these?
The hover-triggered contexts don't really provide me with much more than the summary below the title. Seems redundant.
The left navigation bar I thought was supposed to have a bunch of cool features. I'm only seeing my search history. That may be a nice to have, but it isn't a game changer.
The snow leopard is awful, and isn't that the Mac line of products?
First thing I did as a good SEO nerd/startup CEO was to see how Bing treated http://www.dawdle.com - and I have to say I'm mildly impressed, but disappointed overall.
On the plus side for Bing, the hover-over shows the information we want the user to see, and manages to highlight our five most popular platforms. (Not the first five in our header, which is very impressive.) Google doesn't do the site links for us, even though we've obeyed their best practices. This is good for Bing.
But Bing doesn't do as well with restrictive searches - for example, Google does significantly better than Bing for a search on [dawdle.com] - Bing strips out the .com and treats it very similarly to a search on [dawdle], i.e. treating it as a dictionary term. The [dawdle.com] search on Google brings up a number of news/blog articles about the site.
Also, Bing utterly fails on e-commerce searching, even though they bought Jellyfish and are pushing Cashback heavily. I tried [dawdle zelda] on both, then clicked on "Shopping" for both. Here are the results:
I don't care what you say, a null set is just wrong. Now, yes, we do feed Google Product Search, but that's Microsoft's fault - they shut down the free feed test they had in favor of their paid Cashback search. Dawdle doesn't participate in Cashback, so they don't get a feed. But to fail on that search is crazy; it's on Shopping, and the user's inputted a product search term and indicated a store preference. Google gets this exactly right. (Bing should slurp the GPS feed anyway - the URL is indexable.)
Did anyone else who is using FF3 on Windows Vista w/ Flash Debugger installed get crashes when you try to mouse-over a video preview on a music video/artist search?
I think the issue is caused by improper exception handling in the way that Bing's video preview tries to retrieve frames of preview thumbnails, but it can't find any for the source. The QA might not have caught it with a release version of Flash, but it's an issue for web dev's with the debugging version of Flash player. I know that Bing is in "preview" edition, but someone should file the bugs with Microsoft.
$100 million is apparently the marketing budget 'magic number' to prove you're serious relaunching your search engine... and has been for 10 years. From October 1999:
"Internet investment firm CMGI plans to spend more than $100 million on a 12-month advertising campaign that trumpets major changes aimed at transforming its AltaVista Web directory into a top-tier portal player, sources say."
Alas, the ad blitz didn't do much to revive AltaVista, and it won't be the size of the marketing campaign spend that determines what happens for Bing.
Seems to provide, more or less, the same results as Google on the searches I tested.
Seems to provide less search options/customiations than Google. (unless I'm missing it?)
Lacks moderation of search results. (hide/promote/comments)
Seems to lack a separate category for searching news.
Video search with hover-play thumbnails is nice but no description?
The links to MSN & Live at the top amuse me for some reason.
Overall it seems to be a good replication of where Google was about 2 years ago. I'd say when they set it as the default homepage in Windows a lot of people will continue to use it since it's "good enough"
The search seems fine -- but the look/logo/UI is terrible. And come on, do they really need to spam the search pages with so many conspicuous advertisements that LOOK like the search results? If they want this product to stick, they need to make the search results stand out ...
If I type "es_msg" into Bing I get exactly what I'd expect, the documentation for a function. When I type it into Google I get "did you mean tos_msg" which drives me batty. And the top two results are useless. The third result is correct.
Bing's "Help" is actually really nice and very fast (in Chrome). Or at least I found it easy to navigate through it.
Bing isn't indexing bug.gd error/solutions properly, though, so that's a bit frustrating.
Bing is definitely very fast. Sometimes felt faster than Google.
"tos_msg" -- interesting that Google is picking up on TinyOS and suggesting the term accordingly. May be an indication that they weight universities highly, since TinyOS started as a university project?
I mean the "Did you mean" top two results-- it gives me two results about "tos_msg" which are useless for the particular query and mess me up pretty much every day on other queries.
I don't know, I like it. Results are very on par with Google's. Interface is cleaner, now that Google has a rating system and a lot of other info/links per result.
Only thing I don't like is that I can only set 50 results per page, whereas with Google and Yahoo I can set 100.
I'm gonna set it as my homepage for a few days. That's the only way I'll be able to give it a try and come up with a judgment.
2. Superior image search. Actually, I think Google's image search is a result of them being on top for so long, it's been the same for years with little improvement. I mean, just look at Bing's.
3. Better video search. I love the hover-preview feature. I can see Google implementing it next year after some other mainstream sites implement it and it's no longer a "Bing thing."
4. Slightly cleaner interface. Let me show you: http://r.im/1rf7http://r.im/1rf8
Bing has a line-height of 130% which makes it a little more readable in my opinion. Sure it has more clutter in some areas, but the search results are cleaner and that's what matters to me when I'm scanning through them.
I don't use maps, travel, health, etc., so I can't comment on them, but so far I'm very pleased with the results. I didn't think Microsoft could pull it off and they did.
Hmm, I wonder how much of the difference in search results come from people intentionally gaming Google vs ignoring Bing/Live?
I did a sample search ("rack mount computers") and found 3 different areas for ads on Bing and a single area (well, google shopping, which isn't 100% the same thing) on Google. You'd think with this being MS, they'd burn profitability (e.g. ads) in exchange for market size?
One good point for Bing, however: the results page isn't as 1994ish as Google. Good use of color, less blaring blue-and-underlined text, and an actual layout.
The nebula graphic, however, doesn't make any sense to me. I think Google's pages could use an overhual -- not more stuff on there, just clean up the colors and graphics a bit, like the ubuntu version of google's search page.
Edit: also, the hover box doesn't show up reliably for me (FF3, Opensolaris). When it does show, it matches the background so well I hadn't noticed it until others had mentioned it here.
Overall, a good point's made from this: the search game is probably going to shift towards context sensitivity and user experience. General search is an area where multiple parties (Google + MS) can do a decent job.
120 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadShow just the results for Conelly.
(I then click 'Show just the results for Conelly')http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Conelly
Hey, look at that, it works.
What a disappointment.
The results are exactly what I expect, as good (or nearly so) as Google.
The only exception being advanced query syntax: wildcards in phrases, the ".." range operator, etc. But that's something I can forgive on day 1...
I don't know if Microsoft has ideas for beating Google in the business model arena, but I wouldn't put it past them.
I dunno. In some ways, bing seems more aesthetically pleasing than google. I really liked the infinite image scroll as some others have mentioned.
And a pretty photo versus the occasional Google Doodle is just a matter of taste. I like the photo myself.
Big disappointment...
It'll be interesting to see if the extraneous features catch on or not. The treatment of large companies is nice: http://www.bing.com/search?q=fry%27s
Fast though. At least they understand that much about why Google won.
It's funny to think that after all the engineering expertise that must have gone into this, they're going to lose because of UI design.
I've thought on more than one occasion while burrowing down with repeated queries that search should involve more of the machine prompting me and less of me guessing at the right keywords. Bing's UI promotes that behavior, whereas my eyes just skip over the recommended queries at the bottom of Google.
MS is using Akamai as the CDN to deliver search results, hence it is fast.
Combined with the impressive speed, I think it stands a chance.
Google gives you the advanced search options pane, and then shows you how to format your search query so you can create the advanced search on-the-fly next time (such as by adding -, +, quotes and the like), as they see the command-line interface to their search as superior.
Heh, I love how Microsoft is running a Google ad on "search options" that points to Bing.
Functionally it's disappointing. The context and use case-sensitive thing that is hinted at in the preview video seems almost entirely absent. The preview vid suggested that they will aggregate hotel information, flight information, etc, to create a grander unified experience - I have not seen any of this. Searching for hotels in a city doesn't give me anything except your traditional search results.
The categories are well thought out - but undifferentiated from Google's search term suggestions as it is.
Sadly, this launch seems a bit like the cuil launch - functionally incomplete, but in the web world you really only get one launch.
For example, with the live id and being logged in, I think it would be neat if these background images eventually ended up being something relevant to me rather than something generic.
Right now, there is definitely room for improvement, but I wouldn't say it's downright bad.
The bing logo, on the other hand... the font is poorly chosen, IMHO the kerning is all wrong, it feels like something one would whip up in 10 minutes in Paint, not a professional logo. Furthermore, the choices of font gives me the feeling that they're trying to position this thing as hip and cool (hence the bistro comment), where the system is, as of yet, deserving of none such accolades.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=ijigg&go=&form=QBLH
(I'm running FF 3.0.10 on ubuntu...)
PS: My girlfriend asked if it they called it 'bing' because it makes a 'bing' noise when you search. I laughed but then I thought this would be amusing. Anybody know how would I set about doing such a thing? I'm not a web coder.
I can't help thinking of the Monty Python sketch about "The Machine that goes 'Ping'".
http://www.bing.com/search?q=creative+commons+sound+effects
http://www.google.com/search?q=creative+commons+sound+effect...
There's very little overlap in the first page results, and freesound.org, #1 in Google, doesn't even make Bing's first page.
I'd definitely call that search a win for google. There are far more useful sources of creative commons sound effects in google's first page.
The hover-triggered contexts don't really provide me with much more than the summary below the title. Seems redundant.
The left navigation bar I thought was supposed to have a bunch of cool features. I'm only seeing my search history. That may be a nice to have, but it isn't a game changer.
The snow leopard is awful, and isn't that the Mac line of products?
On the plus side for Bing, the hover-over shows the information we want the user to see, and manages to highlight our five most popular platforms. (Not the first five in our header, which is very impressive.) Google doesn't do the site links for us, even though we've obeyed their best practices. This is good for Bing.
But Bing doesn't do as well with restrictive searches - for example, Google does significantly better than Bing for a search on [dawdle.com] - Bing strips out the .com and treats it very similarly to a search on [dawdle], i.e. treating it as a dictionary term. The [dawdle.com] search on Google brings up a number of news/blog articles about the site.
Also, Bing utterly fails on e-commerce searching, even though they bought Jellyfish and are pushing Cashback heavily. I tried [dawdle zelda] on both, then clicked on "Shopping" for both. Here are the results:
http://www.google.com/products?q=dawdle%20zelda&oe=utf-8...
http://www.bing.com/shopping/search?q=dawdle+zelda&mkt=e...
I don't care what you say, a null set is just wrong. Now, yes, we do feed Google Product Search, but that's Microsoft's fault - they shut down the free feed test they had in favor of their paid Cashback search. Dawdle doesn't participate in Cashback, so they don't get a feed. But to fail on that search is crazy; it's on Shopping, and the user's inputted a product search term and indicated a store preference. Google gets this exactly right. (Bing should slurp the GPS feed anyway - the URL is indexable.)
google, wikipedia and now bing.
Whats the obsession with nebula?
The image searcher is decent though.
I think the issue is caused by improper exception handling in the way that Bing's video preview tries to retrieve frames of preview thumbnails, but it can't find any for the source. The QA might not have caught it with a release version of Flash, but it's an issue for web dev's with the debugging version of Flash player. I know that Bing is in "preview" edition, but someone should file the bugs with Microsoft.
As usual, it is good at finding queries where not many pages apply.
But for competitive search terms, they don't sort the it right.
Better than Live though... give it 5 more years.
The logo doesn't look that cool to me.
There are lot of unwanted random stuff in the UI. Not clean.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-231154.html
"Internet investment firm CMGI plans to spend more than $100 million on a 12-month advertising campaign that trumpets major changes aimed at transforming its AltaVista Web directory into a top-tier portal player, sources say."
Alas, the ad blitz didn't do much to revive AltaVista, and it won't be the size of the marketing campaign spend that determines what happens for Bing.
Seems to provide less search options/customiations than Google. (unless I'm missing it?)
Lacks moderation of search results. (hide/promote/comments)
Seems to lack a separate category for searching news.
Video search with hover-play thumbnails is nice but no description?
The links to MSN & Live at the top amuse me for some reason.
Overall it seems to be a good replication of where Google was about 2 years ago. I'd say when they set it as the default homepage in Windows a lot of people will continue to use it since it's "good enough"
Bing's "Help" is actually really nice and very fast (in Chrome). Or at least I found it easy to navigate through it.
Bing isn't indexing bug.gd error/solutions properly, though, so that's a bit frustrating.
Bing is definitely very fast. Sometimes felt faster than Google.
Yes, Bing does feel really fast, but it's not like I've often felt like I was waiting too long for a Google result.
Only thing I don't like is that I can only set 50 results per page, whereas with Google and Yahoo I can set 100.
I'm gonna set it as my homepage for a few days. That's the only way I'll be able to give it a try and come up with a judgment.
1. Super fast.
2. Image search is far superior to Google's.
3. Travel search is great. Try "deals to hawaii".
4. I like the name. Easy to remember and only 4 letters.
5. Weather searches work great.
6. I like the related searches and search history on the left.
7. I like the wikipedia integration.
The quality of normal results (the only ones I can get) is bellow Google.
From the US you get powerset-like answers to questions like "president of x".
1. Similar quality of results.
2. Superior image search. Actually, I think Google's image search is a result of them being on top for so long, it's been the same for years with little improvement. I mean, just look at Bing's.
3. Better video search. I love the hover-preview feature. I can see Google implementing it next year after some other mainstream sites implement it and it's no longer a "Bing thing."
4. Slightly cleaner interface. Let me show you: http://r.im/1rf7 http://r.im/1rf8 Bing has a line-height of 130% which makes it a little more readable in my opinion. Sure it has more clutter in some areas, but the search results are cleaner and that's what matters to me when I'm scanning through them.
I don't use maps, travel, health, etc., so I can't comment on them, but so far I'm very pleased with the results. I didn't think Microsoft could pull it off and they did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_(search_engine)
http://www.bing.com/reference/semhtml/Kumo_(search_engine)?q...
(looks like the May 27 version)
I did a sample search ("rack mount computers") and found 3 different areas for ads on Bing and a single area (well, google shopping, which isn't 100% the same thing) on Google. You'd think with this being MS, they'd burn profitability (e.g. ads) in exchange for market size?
One good point for Bing, however: the results page isn't as 1994ish as Google. Good use of color, less blaring blue-and-underlined text, and an actual layout.
The nebula graphic, however, doesn't make any sense to me. I think Google's pages could use an overhual -- not more stuff on there, just clean up the colors and graphics a bit, like the ubuntu version of google's search page.
Edit: also, the hover box doesn't show up reliably for me (FF3, Opensolaris). When it does show, it matches the background so well I hadn't noticed it until others had mentioned it here.
Overall, a good point's made from this: the search game is probably going to shift towards context sensitivity and user experience. General search is an area where multiple parties (Google + MS) can do a decent job.