Whoopa Mr Bing
Microsoft has launched a new search engine called Bing. It is intended to take business away from Google (of course). The engine is very sophisticated and does way more than just return search results.
Intro video: http://www.decisionengine.com/Default.html
Actual engine: http://www.bing.com/
Try a few searches in images and notice their interesting lack of accessibility standards. It looks like Microsoft has decided to become pro-frames. How awful. The map search has the same problems.
However we CAN learn something from Bing. Try a video search. At first I got a fright when a video thumbnail started playing on mouse-over, but after a few times it was pleasant feature. They don't play the whole video on mouse-over - just little collage pieces - but it gives you a much better idea of the content than just a thumbnail does. Kinda cool.
The search results on the web end of things is also a nice improvement on Live and Google. Each result now has an AJAX popup that appears to the right on mouse-over, which shows more relevant content from the destination page, including some navigation options on the destination page.
The biggest skull-scratcher though is why they often use the meta description as the content of the individual search results. Google abandoned this eons ago. In my testing I got results where the meta description was not even relevant to the page content, and yet the meta description is what was used in the results.
Search results form sites like Amazon now include additional secondary links which single out things like reviews. That is a nice feature as well.
Taking market share away from Google will be no easy feat - especially by Microsoft since their perception in the marketplace is not favorable. However it must be said that this is a good effort and may make a dent in Google over time.
-Andreas
Posted: 2009-06-11 10:45:25
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