Why I like bing.com
// June 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // review, website
There has been a lot of talk about Bing and after using it on and off for a while, I think I like bing.
Well, it can search.
I have not done a keyword search comparison between Bing and Google but my search experience with Bing has been satisfying. I did not feel that Google with the added information that it gets since am logged in does a better job, which means that bing has a smart way of solving the cold-start problem or Bing has understood that people will search the way they search as if they were using Google, which is trickier than one may think since it adds constraints to an already complicated problem.
I know Microsoft is marketing it as a decision engine, now thats a forward-looking approach which semantically makes Bing somewhere between Google and Wolfram|Alpha. I am not claiming that they are there already or that the users have grown to understand how decision engines work nor is it very clear where a commercial search engine (which by default is google) ends and a decision engine starts. It may be just a marketing trick but its working.
It looks good.
Its very un-microsoft. Now maybe microsoft has changed but the microsoft sites that I have to visit on my day job are always an information-overload-trying-to-sneak-another-application, which is worse since the firm has an across-the-spectrum account with MS and if there was a new product we’d buy it too. MSDN is comprehensive bordering on verbose but since its community-driven, which makes people like me part of the problem, I’ll let it slide. Back to bing, it is refreshing. Since the rise of Google search, theres been a somewhat tacit but widely accepted agreement that a spartan, functional look was the answer to the overdose that is Yahoo. But bing, is neat without being stark. The images on the mainpage are as a rule always interesting but never overpowering. The images have not so subtle showcases about bing’s power and sometimes they can surprise you.
The search results look good. I like the extra-fetch when I scroll over the search result. The extra-fetch blob is clickable, so I can open the result in a new tab right from there with minimum mouse movement. I like that. I dont like the sponsored links because with immediate previous searches & similar popular searches on the left and the sponsored results on the right I get less space for my results!
The name is smart.
Its a small word, pretty accent-agnostic and it has a potential to be treated as a verb. I’ll google bing it. Its smart, maybe far-fetched and would not have crept in if I did not think bing was here to stay.
It could do more, I hope.
I wish there is an option to collate my existing search result with my previous search or a popular search (the ones that show up on the left) which is more than just the result of the putting all the keywords in the search field. Something like google squared but better.
