Linda posted on June 15, 2009 14:31
On June 3rd, Microsoft started rolling out what they are calling a Decision Engine, Bing. My team was very anxious to try it out to see if it was going to live up its advance billing. So for an hour or so that Friday, they were checking things out and sharing the things they thought were really spectacular.
The first thing that will hit you when you visit is the spectacular photograph that is displayed on the home page. I can't tell you what it will be because the picture changes every day. Each one has a few squares you can mouse over to reveal some fact about the location and a link to more information. You can also look back through the previous days photographs. I do enjoy reading the facts and trying to figure out where it is without clicking on the link.
My team was incredibly impressed with the mapping functions and they were demonstrating it to the entire office. You can see this for yourself by clicking on maps on the left side of the screen and entering an address. There is a bird's eye view that can zoom in as close as 20yds with amazing detail. There is also a 3D view that lets you move the images around. Depending on where you are looking, you can see a building from above as well as all 4 sides. You should note that not all features are supported in all browsers or for all possible addresses. If you want to be sure that everything will work, you will need to use a relatively recent version of Internet Explorer - no surprise there! And there are more views available in cities, particularly large cities, than in more rural areas.
According to Microsoft studies, only 1 in 4 searches results in useful information. Bing is supposed to employ new techniques to deliver more relevant results allowing the user to get the information they are looking for more easily. I probably need to spend more time using it for a more reasoned response, but so far I'm not really seeing that. I still find that when I search on something like "computer repair east lansing', I primarily get results that are simply directories. It's almost like the search engine gives you a list of other places you can go to search. This is not a complaint about Bing in particular; I find this to be true not matter where I search. Maybe the companies in the categories I search are just not very good at search engine optimization! I might also get different results if I wasn't trying to search locally.
One interesting feature of note is the listing of business pinpointed on the map, which is similar to the results you might get with Google. This does show up at the top of the results which is helpful. When I clicked on one of the listings, it took me to at listing for the business with a map on the right. The map shows how to get to the business for several directions with different color lines. Clicking on the corresponding symbol below gives you directions from a major highway to the business. If you know how to get to the beginning point, you have your directions with only one click. There are also a number of links to web pages for the business or that mention the business listed there as well.
I also do a lot of image searches, so I decided to check that out as well. I'm not looking for anything in particular right now, so I can't really comment on the results of the search, but one thing I immediately noticed is that the page just keeps loading images. While I can only see about 15 on my screen at once, the page says it is displaying 1 - 20 (I can see the top edge of 16 - 20), all I have to do to see more is scroll down. As I scroll down more appear to load. I don't have to click on next to see more. That is a neat feature. It is necessary to mouse over the image to see what the resolution is, but you can specify small, medium, large or wallpaper to control the resolution of the images that are displayed. Depending on your search terms, you may also see related searches on the left hand side. If you don't find what you are looking for under your terms, maybe you will see something there that works better!
I'm sure that there are many more little features that it will take time to uncover and only time will tell if Microsoft is able to pull people away from Google. If you have taken Bing for a test drive, I would love to read your comments!