Bing! Microsoft just released their revamped Live Search engine and name it Bing. Make sure you have selected “United States” as country and not “Hong Kong SAR”, otherwise, you will just get a Bing Beta rather than a Preview version of Bing.

Google-like Search Result Page

▲ Bing Search Result of “Hong Kong”

▲ Bing Map Search Result of “Hong Kong”

▲ Bing Images Search Result of “Hong Kong”

In sense of user-interface, I can’t really spot any major difference. The look-and-feel of the search result page is even very similar to Google, except Bing has some photo clip art under its logo and a search keyword sidebar are insert on the left.

The sidebar should take a credit, it does list out keyword-related information, e.g. additional keywords, related search phrases and result display options. However, as a decision engine, Bing’s results during I try-out disappointed me as it is not as intelligent as i expected, and it doesn’t differentiate itself from a general search engine to become a real tool to help people to make decisions.

Shopping and Video Search Results Look Better

▲ Bing Shopping Search Result of “Mobile Phone”

▲ Bing Video Search Result of “Britain’s Got Talent”

Bing’s Shopping Search with users & expert reviews, and other product options are great to ease user to compare different product, but i doubt if we will have this features in Hong Kong. And it’s Video Search result listing are awesome too, as we can play the videos within the search result page, of which Google has stopped this features.

In general, Bing surprised me without any suprising features and I can’t see any major features making it as a decision engine as Microsoft Bing team said. I will wait to see for more intelligent search engine in future release.

Extended Reading

• Google and Bing: Plagiarism or … ? by Cappella’s Blogspot
• Bing Launch, Day Two by The Big Money
• Badda-Bing Indeed. by TechCrunch

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Microsoft is launching their latest generation search engine – Bing (previous known as codename Kumo) by June 3. Together with the recently released Wolfram|Alpha, they introduce much speculations about the future of search engines, in my view, it’s about evolution of intelligence in search engines.

Bing – A Decision Engine

▲ Bing Search Result Page (See more in Bing’s Introductory Video)

The biggest change in Bing is the presentation of information on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). They are customized for the type of search keywords. Its aim is to help users have a better way to search, bing and decide easily, so the Bing team calls Bing a decision engine in introduction letter:

We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions.

- Bing Team, Microsoft

Microsoft is going launch this decision engine with pretty huge spending campaign of $80 – $100 million [via AdAge]. Definitely, it is looking for a bigger slice of market share in both search engine and keyword ad market. Let’s see if this decision engine can bring any challenge to search giant Google in June.

Wolfram Alpha – An Answer-Engine

▲ Wolfram|Alpha Search Result for “President of U.S.”

Another powerful intelligent search engine, Wolfram|Alpha, was just launched on Jun 16. Its significant difference with other search engines is that it answers your specific questions directly with appropriate format, but not listing links. So it seems like a Wikipedia to me rather than another Google, and kind of Google + Wikipedia as you can search the same questions in Google and probably it shows you Wikipedia links.

Search Engines need Intelligence

To conclude, both Bing and Wolfram|Alpha confirm the trend of search engine to provide better user experience, they have to be much intelligent. Their results should address users’ questions with easy-to-understand presentation, but not only links.

Extended Reading

• Bing! Microsoft Prepares For War With A Revamped Search Engine (Screenshots) by TechCrunch
• Wolfram ‘search engine’ goes live by BBC News
• Wolfram|Alpha by Wikipedia

Related Posts

• Microsoft’s Bing Surprises Us With No Surprising Features
• Google Hong Kong Finance Beta launched
• Beyond Photo Tagging: Face Recognition