Microsoft’s new search called ‘Bing‘ is made public today. I just played around with a varied set of tests on Bing and here is my review based on my findings. As always, my very first search query is ‘http’ and the very first impression for me was a total disaster. It was damn faster though! Bing said it found about 13,100,000,000 results for the search query! While the very first page displayed the top 10 search results for the search query ‘http‘, only one was relevant while the remaining 9 were totally irrelevant (see the attached image). 
This is a massive let down for me. However Srinath who is experimenting at the same time in US is getting different set of results! he gets to see this. Whatever, it doesn’t seem to like non-US netizens!
In its current state, Bing doesn’t appear to be the next best thing in search as the search relevancy is the most important aspect for web search which hasn’t really impressed. Apart from that, I have found few interesting things, search for the words like ‘google‘ or ‘yahoo‘. You will get to see just one result found for each. I think that is pretty impressive and nice of them to keep it short and simple instead of bombarding with seamless number of search results when compared to traditional search engines.
Another feature I like is the mouse-over pop up screen that appears to the right of the search results. It gives a sneak preview of the article excerpt in a convenient pop up window. Yet another fact I like the most is the response time for displaying the search results.
Now coming to the multimedia search, few nicely thought features are available. Few to name would be the endless scrolling in image search works very well (it may be recalled that this was first introduced in Live’s image search). At the same time video search is excellent too. You can play back videos within Bing, this feature helps to quickly preview them. There is also a mechanism to filter images by size, layout, color, style and people – yet to explore more on this. Here is another caveat – do an image search with your exact name as in ‘facebook’, Bing will show up your facebook picture! you decide whether it is good or bad 🙂
Haven’t explored much on maps and news search on Bing. Though some of the features are really good, the only thing that I am very skeptical is the releavancy. If that main aim itself is compromised, I don’t find any reason to use it again. What is your take?
Rob Abdul says
I don’t think that Bing will be successful until Microsoft sort out their indexing issues.
For example, sites that have almost all their pages indexed in Google have barely 20% indexed in Bing.
Therefore Bing is not seeing most of the web.
I wish Microsoft would sort this out – they have millions at their disposal and the brightest people working for them.
Thejesh GN says
Image search is pretty decent. Even the ego image search 🙂
Guru says
@Loverboy 🙂
Thanks for agreeing with me
@Mohan
“Having said that, all that got indexed *may* not be the most relevant!”
How does search engine distinguish whether the page is relevant and to be topped or not? does it has any AI involved? i am into server programming and AI for a while but it is impossible to a machine to identify authenticity and priority just by some weird algorithm
@Kiran
“That means, what ever you get to see on yahoo is more relevent when it comes to the content of the top search results.”
Like LoverBoy(Manjunath) said the Top results in yahoo are most of the time are paid ones and between Google Page Ranking system though rather old it works like a charm because not all the crap site and crap page will get backlinks and good pageranks.
@to all
correct me if i am wrong 🙂
Mohan says
@Manju
I know.. that was an intended put at you :D. Btw., Bing’s burst has just lasted for a day. It is back to where it was as of now.
Manjunath says
@Mohan
Sure i am 🙂 and between i got the stats Here and it was a typo error it shud have been “2” 😉
Mohan says
@Guru
You got it right. In my view google has solved the problem of indexing web in short time where in others are yet to catch up in that space. Having said that, all that got indexed *may* not be the most relevant!
@Manju
I know you are an hardcore loverboy of goog.. have fun.. neverthless your math accounts to 110% 🙂
@Kiran
Well, that is all said and done.. what matters the most at the end of the day is the ‘Moolah’!
Manjunath says
@kiran
Hmmmm…. what ever it is according to recent trends 76% of the searches on W W W are from google, and rest 34% are assorted between various search engines… then why do people are still opting for Google rather than yahoo if it is so relevant?
remember Google Does not market on search results… where as Yahoo Does 🙂
Kishore says
I don’t quite agree with Guru and Manjunath. Google search results can be fooled easily even if you have irrelevent content, it purely goes by search engine optimization meta data. Where in the same is not possible with Yahoo. That means, what ever you get to see on yahoo is more relevent when it comes to the content of the top search results. It doesn’t simply rely on page ranking algorithm unlike google.
Manjunath says
@Guru
You are very true!!! Google Takes less than 1 hour to get the fresh content thats the caliber of ” GOOGLE” where as yahoo, Bing and other major search engines might takes days together to crawl the content and who knows they even might not detect…..
Guru says
Take a test, type a unique keyword on the net leave it any website as a comment then wait for 30mins or an hour then search on all the three search engines google,yahoo and bing you can see the result in google search not in yahoo or bing
now wait for a day then follow the same procedure again now also you can find the same result
and after two days i can find the result on Google and yahoo but not on Bing this shows
Google Ranks #1
Yahoo #2 and
Bing #3
Ashwathy Nair says
Interesting write-up!
Mohan says
@Shwet
thats funny.. either my blog is highly SEO’ed or bing is too good with their fresh content 🙂
Shwet says
Mohan, search my name Shwet Prabhat, you will be surprised to see the result 😉
Manjunath says
Whether it is Bing, Kumo, MSN Search, Live Search it cannot beat Google In terms of relevancy and freshness…. Google Rocks and highly reliable
Srinath says
@Mohan, I have am not on any company but even in my previous company (u know which one), there used to be a global launch something.companyName.com and years later there used to be something.companyName.in.. and the search…in used to suck big time till recently which was not the same code base/data compared to global index.. I have seen this thread on several times..
Mohan says
@Srinath
yeah, I am too hoping for it to get better 🙂 I fail to understand and not in a position to buy in your argument on Bing being incomplete for non US versions. I presume the code base is the same for core functionality!
@Chirantan
Yes. It is well organized and UI looks neat. Hope it gets better over a period of time before the product is being dominated by the big G or Y :-p
Chirantan says
Mohan, bing is not returning relevant results for most of the technical terms. I like the user interface and the way search has been organized. My concern is still the same as yours. what is the use of a search product if it is not relevant?
Srinath says
Looks like non-US version is an incomplete version –
“If you are using Bing outside North America, chances are that you seeing a localized version of Bing that may be missing some features. For instance, the Indian version of Bing.com doesn’t have search history and the image on the Bing home page here is not interactive as in the US version.” More details on that here
Srinath says
I agree that it cannot take over all the searches in one day.. but surely its better.. its fast, has fresh results for many of my queries.. fresh results is orthogonal and equally important aspect apart from relevance.. anyways, competition is always better from a consumer point of view 🙂