June 30, 2009

Seems like Google’s competitors just keep increasing. Perhaps the most important new entrant in the search business is Bing, branded by Microsoft as a “decision engine.”

Bing brings some neat tools to web users, including a handful of tags in their ‘popular now’ section for those who may be searching for similar topics or users who might just find them interesting.

The home page offers six options: videos, shopping, news, maps and travel. These sections capture the key areas users want their search to yield. Finding images is really cool; users can filter images by size, layout, colour/black and white and style – photograph or illustration. Such features are great for limiting a search.

Microsoft promises a rich homepage image, a more organized experience and an improved index for more relevant results. They’ve certainly delivered on the rich home page image. But you encounter their old tricks when trying to view previous images: you must download something first! As usual, there is nothing here unique except that they have been brought together in one place.

Google has been numero uno for a long time and is likely to stay so until some new technology displaces them. Users know the search engine intimately and some even think Google is the Internet.  Bing doesn’t really do anything glaringly better, so there is no real incentive to switch. But if you want to check out a search alternative you should take the tour.