stuart piazza .blog

Microsoft has been pissed off for quite some time now. Though their share of the software market is way beyond any other company’s dreams, their online presence has been an utter fail since the beginning. Live.com was launched to drive people away from Google, and as most of us know, since none of us used it, it was a failure as well. This is why Microsoft is starting over with their new and improved search engine, Bing, which just launched a few days ahead of schedule. Has Microsoft finally convinced me to come over to their side from my love of the Google side? No, but they’re close.

I'm not obsessed with dogs.

In many ways, Bing has some pretty cool features that Google doesn’t. The first new thing you may notice is the related search categories on the left sidebar. If you do a simple search for “dogs“, instead of pages displaying in the search that only have the word dog in them, Bing creates some extended options for you such as “Breeders” or “Toys”. Well, Google has this too, but you have to enable it.

When looking at your search results, Bing will find the most popular pages or categories within the site and display them for you. You can also roll your mouse over and preview some text from the homepage before you decide to head to that site or not. Some sites have reported that these “popular pages” aren’t totally accurate, but I’m sure in time Bing will become propagated correctly and things will sort themselves out. I love this feature of Bing.

Another thing you may notice right off the bat is the speed of Bing. Whether you are changing to a search category or  going to another page on Bing, the load time is almost instant. This shows that Microsoft has really improved their architecture and optimization of the platform over their previous attempts, and overall the experience is a bit quicker than that of Google. This is something that I want in a search engine, and quick speeds is a must.

I like Bing Images better than Google Images. After all these years of searching Google for images, I think I may make my switch over to Bing when in need of someone’s body to Photoshop one of my friend’s heads on, or any other purpose of searching for an image out there that I may not be aware of. Instead resorting to pagination, Bing displays most of the found images on a single page. There’s also no text or url, like there is on Google, so therefore it is truly an image search. You can instantly change the zoom of all of the found images, and it is easier to find the direct link to the image than it is on Google since it displays it immediately after you click on the image.

Searching for Videos is pretty intuitive as well, as it searches for videos on any site, rather than videos only on YouTube on Google Videos. Google’s video search right now is mostly video results mixed with regular results, and though it works, it’s still not a dedicated video search. On Bing, there is also a preview of the video that you can watch by rolling your mouse over the thumbnail. Though this is cool, don’t try to preview a video at work if NSFW is in the title.

Shopping, maps, and etc are the same they were on Live. Though they aren’t bad, I don’t see myself switching from Google Maps or Google Earth anytime soon. Also, I don’t know what is with Microsoft’s fetish of defaulting to annoying hot air balloon or forest backgrounds throughout the search bar and results. I want simple, and this makes it still feel like the old Live.com, which I hated. Also, if you try out Bing on your iPhone or mobile web device, it just forwards you to Live Mobile, which just isn’t cool.

The unique features, speed, and intuitiveness of Bing makes it a good competitor towards Google. It is definitely Microsofts best attempt, but it still falls short in the beautiful simplicity that Google offers. There is no web app, annoying backgrounds, it still needs to be propagated correctly. Though Bing is a vast improvement of Live and I will be checking it out every now and then, I’ll still use Google for all of my searching needs. Microsoft is close, and competition is good, but there are still some things that need to be worked out. I really like Bing, but it has yet to win my love. I look forward to seeing Google’s reaction to this, and can’t wait for future builds of Bing.

Technorati Tags: Bing, Microsoft, Google, Search Engine, Search, Live