In case you haven’t yet seen one of the advertisements in Microsoft’s $100 million campaign, Bing (www.bing.com) is the company’s latest attempt to challenge Google in online search. At one level, it’s simply renamed Windows Live Search: typing “www.live.com” into your browser takes you directly to Bing. At the same time, Microsoft appears to have created Bing from scratch, with lots of thought about what features people might want. Hence the new name.
The key idea behind Bing is that people search the Web with a task or decision in mind, and most searchers suffer from an overload of results. Microsoft is cleverly attempting to create a new product category for Bing, to avoid direct comparisons with the market leader. Bing is a “decision engine,” not a mere search engine like Google. You can see a brief video that does a good job of presenting the marketing message at www.DecisionEngine.com. Microsoft has also built a site called Discover Bing (www.discoverbing.com) to help people understand why they should be using it. (Note to Microsoft: when you have to do a lot of explaining about why your product is better, it’s not a good sign. Just ask the folks at Ask.com.)
Battle of the home pages
The most obvious difference between Bing and Google is their home pages. Google is a starkly minimalist page consisting of its logo, the search box and a lot of white space. Bing, in contrast, embeds the search box in a colorful, nearly full-screen image, which changes on a weekly basis (this week, it’s a group of surfers riding a ginormous wave).
The image itself has hot spots that appear when you move your mouse over it. If you position your cursor over a hot spot, a small window appears with teaser text related to the image, such as, “Looking for waves like this one?” Clicking on the linked text presents a page of search results. It’s not always clear what you’re going to get when you click, so it’s aimed at someone who arrives at Bing to look at the picture, not someone focused on a particular search.
Search results
If you do a Web search, the results from Bing and Google look fairly similar. Both have search results on the main part of the page and text ads in the right-hand column. Bing adds a left-hand column with additional elements.
At the top of the left-hand column, Bing attempts to categorize the results. For example, searching for “California” adds categories for Maps, Tourism, Attractions, History and Images. Searching for “Restaurant” produces only Images and Local as categories. It’s not clear to me how these categories are chosen. Searching for “Martin Luther” presented Images and Videos as categories, but searching for “Martin Luther King” gave me News and Images. Unlike some other search engines, the categories don’t appear to be generated by looking at the content. Microsoft has probably hand-categorized the top searches that people do, which makes it look smart without actually having to be smart.
Underneath the categories, Bing offers a list of related searches, a feature it shares with Google, but that Google positions less obviously at the bottom of its results page. Bing also keeps track of your recent searches, a nice feature if you’re trying different phrases to narrow down your search. Both of these are probably real improvements over what Google offers.
If you do an image search, Bing presents a page of pictures, much like Google does. The Google results are very busy looking, as each image is surrounded by information about it. Bing simply presents the images and cleverly pops up the ancillary information when you move your cursor over them. This reduces clutter, but it forces me to move my mouse to find out how big each image is, something that I can readily see with Google.
Bing video search is even more sexy (that’s a technical term). First, there are more results per page. By default, Bing video results are presented as a grid of thumbnail images that makes more of them visible onscreen simultaneously. Google only has a list view, which has fewer results on a single screen (a list view like Google’s is an option with Bing). The coolest thing is that the thumbnails are playable: when you move over one, the thumbnail itself starts to play, saving you from having to click through to see the video on its own page. That’s sexy.
Certain types of searches deliver specialized results. For example, searching for flights from SFO to DFW gave me information about cheap tickets, current low fares and a forecast about the price trend for tickets. While producing more information than Google for the same query, it’s not as useful as going to Expedia and actually searching for flights on a specific day.
People make extensive use of search when shopping. Searching for “Toshiba laptop” brought up a results page with pictures, but not much more information than Google. I certainly couldn’t make a final decision about what laptop to buy. The real innovation (if it can be called that) is “Bing cashback.” Evidently, Microsoft has struck deals with online retailers (such as NewEgg.com for computer hardware) where you receive cash back when you make a purchase. The percentage varies by vendor. For example, NewEgg.com offers 2.5 percent. Of course, you need to have at least $5 accumulated in your account to request a check, and you’re limited to $2,500 in a calendar year. There may be more in the fine print; see www.bing.com/cashback.
Is Bing for you?
That’s the real question, of course. If you’re buying something worth more than $200, it may be worth taking advantage of Bing cashback. But I’m not convinced Bing really is a decision engine, even though it has some slick interface features and a couple of truly useful additions.
I’ve made Bing my default browser search engine (ironically, my browser is Google Chrome). Check my TechTalk blog to see what I decide after using it for the few weeks between now and when this magazine arrives in your mailbox.
In the meantime, check out the Bing website, if you haven’t already.
