Digital Media Buzz > Bada Bing: Microsoft’s Search Engine Offers a Bevy of Features

Bada Bing: Microsoft’s Search Engine Offers a Bevy of Features

By Sherry Londo-Thomas

On June 3, 2009, Microsoft replaced its Live Search Engine with the new Bing. Previously known as Kumo while it was being developed, Bing is Microsoft’s hope for beating out Google and Yahoo search engines. In its first week, Bing took 11.1 percent of the Internet searches, according to comScore.

Like Google with Chrome, Microsoft has taken to the airwaves to promote Bing with a 60-second commercial entitled Manifesto.

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt had a few words for Microsoft in his interview on Fox News: It’s not the first (search-engine market) entry for Microsoft. They do this about once a year. From Bing’s perspective, they have a bunch of new ideas and there are some things that are missing. We think search is about comprehensiveness, freshness, the scale and size of what we do. And it’s difficult for them to copy that.

“You earn (the No. 1 spot). You don’t buy it with ads. You earn it, and you earn it customer by customer, search by search, answer by answer. And we believe that today we beat our competitors because we’re so focused on comprehensiveness, speed, freshness and having the depth that people really care about.”

Microsoft’s director of Bing, Stefan Weitz, responds to Schmidt’s criticism: “[W]e recognize that people tell us four things that any engine has to have to be relevant: its relevance, its speed, its previews, its multi-media. … We enhanced our indexing capabilities. We enhanced our crawling capabilities. We really enhanced performance to make the thing very, very fast. We really invested a lot in just getting the core of the engine to be highly relevant out of the gate.”

One of the great features Microsoft’s Bing offers is its “hover” feature. Hover allows users to see an excerpt of the page by moving the mouse to the left. A vertical line and a yellow dot appears and holding, or hovering, the mouse in that spot, enables you to read information in deciding if this is the desired information. This helps eliminate wasted time by clicking through to sites that aren’t related to your search. Hover is a plus, however, if you don’t know that moving the arrow of your mouse to the right until a yellow dot appears, you’ll miss this feature.

Other features of Bing are:

• Continuous — If you’re searching for images, just keep scrolling through. There’s no need to hit next in order to get to the next group of images, the images are continuous.
• Shopping Search — Offers a variety of reviews and other refinements and was recently combined with cashback offers. Check out the opinion-ranking feature that looks for reviews across the web and categorizes them into positive and negative.
• Local search — Includes data and maps, as well as opinion ranking.
• Travel search — Integrates the Farecast service that predicts future flight costs
• Health search — Dedicated to providing medical information.
• Web Groups and Explore Pane — Organize information, cutting the user’s search time, helping he or she find relevant information.
• Quick Tabs — Works like a table of contents.

“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” says Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

According to Forbes, Bing goes beyond other search engines — it possesses deep innovation on core search areas, entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition and document summarization technology.

Only time and the number of users will tell if Microsoft’s Bing (The Decision Engine) will overtake Google.