Microsoft Cries “bing(o)” on Google’s Number

Fully online yesterday* but still in beta, Microsoft’s new search engine ‘bing’ may have hit on something. But is it enough to take the top number from Google?
First impressions of the site are that it is fast and surprisingly useable for a Google competitor. The front page opens quickly and when you mouse over a search result a pop-out menu appears. This menu contains a preview of the text of the page and a list of links on the page itself. Search sources can be refined to a specific website’s domain in the ‘advanced search’ menu or by simply typing the domain on the end of the term.

The image search tool CoolIris seems almost clunky compared to the bing’s image search, which loads images quickly and in an array that makes browsing them easy. Like the search tool, bing gives you picture information when you mouse over the image. Clicking on the image will give you a page similar to the one that Google gives, with the addition of a column on the left of the screen containing the other image results for the term.

Video search plays a searched video from within the search window when you mouse over the image preview of the video. This means no more jumping around pages and reloading to see what you have found.
bing also introduces multimap, which seems just like Google Maps but with more information options for the places you search.

Google’s search algorithm is hard to beat and the results seem less relevant in bing than Google at the moment. The site preview with links in bing is helpful, but is no substitute to a good result. However Google’s image search is dated and clunky compared to the slick, fast, easy to use bing. It seems that Microsoft is trying to claw back market share, and for image and video search it has got me. (Even if I am peeved that it doesn’t find this blog!)
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In my wanderings I found that going to bing in some other languages meant that there were no sponsored links, and some of these are in English.

*From Wikipedia’s page on bing