When it comes to picking a search engine, we all know the obvious choice. Microsoft has always aimed to be that “obvious choice” with all computer users. They have succeeded in doing so in most areas other than web search engines. Statistically, Google owns 64 percent of the U.S. search market, with Yahoo at 16.3 percent, and Microsoft Live Search a mere 9.9 percent. Recently Microsoft released its new web search engine “Bing” which is in fact a newer version of Microsoft Live. “Bing” hopes to change these numbers drastically sooner than later.
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Besides introducing a new look to Microsoft’s search interface, Bing adds a spiced up navigation for search results, including a new left-hand navigation bar, a hover feature that lets users preview Web pages before visiting them, and a categorized search feature that groups search results by topic category. Among Bing’s core improvements over Live Search, are its capability to mine the Web more deeply and to deliver more-relevant search results faster.
But the most striking feature of Bing has to be in the manner in which it displays the search results. Whereas Google emphasizes a simple, quick-loading design and a list of highly relevant search results, Bing’s search results are organized into search categories such as Images, Maps and Travel. In a particular search, Bing creates search categories dynamically in response to the search query.
The feedback on “Bing” has varied from good to bad making it that much more difficult to give a proper recommendation. Microsoft has struggled in the past to compete with Google for search market share.
So its accurate to say that they would most definitely put their best minds behind it to make it successful. Its also reported that Microsoft is putting staggering $100 million marketing campaign behind it. This is a clear indication as to how much of an effort and focus they are putting to making “Bing” the de facto standard in web searching.
Try it out at http://bing.com
As if the name is not funny enough, during the development phase “Bing” was known as “Kumo”!
DID YOU KNOW?
- Google’s index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising of billions of web pages. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a second.
- Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica !
- The staff at Google, better known as “Googlers” are multifaceted. One operations manager, who keeps the Google network in good health is a former neurosurgeon. One software engineer is a former rocket scientist.
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