The Adido Digital Blog

Microsoft’s new search engine “bing” went online worldwide on the 3rd June 2009.

It is described as a “Decision Engine and consumer brand”, specifically designed to help customers making better and faster decisions with regard to purchasing products, planning journeys and finding local businesses.

To establish itself in the world of search engines, bing introduces new features with which it tries to differentiate itself from its competitors. Bing’s promising ambition is to provide a more organized search experience that enables users to navigate more easily through the confusion of search overload. This eventually should lead to faster, but nevertheless informed, decisions (Microsoft PressPass 2009).

An Explorer Pane on the left hand side, for example, offers a search history, appropriate subgroups and related links. This navigation set helps to arrange the initial search query. Other novel characteristics include: an application that allows to hover over a search result in other to obtain a preview of the site’s content, plane ticket information, which lets you know the cheapest ticket and future prize predictions, current stock information, restaurants reviews and movie listings (Microsoft PressPass 2009).

Unfortunately, these new and exciting properties are only available on the American version of bing, making the UK version an incomplete beta (guardian.co.uk 2009).

At the same time, bing is very similar to google, since it offers a map and shopping feature, as well as instant answers for currency, flight status and definitions (Microsoft PressPass 2009).

Reading through many comments and blogs on the web, there is no consistency of which search engine is considered to be superior, google or bing. Yet, it seems, the majority of people believes that google still delivers more relevant and useful search results (Barron’s online 2009; Computerworld 2009).

However, bing’s video search is impressive, as the user can narrow the results down by selecting videos via the length, resolution, source and screen size (www.bing.com).

In overall, it appears that, at least for the moment, google does not need to worry about losing its number one search engine status. But who knows, Microsoft’s bing is just in the formation phase and maybe, in several years, people rather bing than google the latest news.