A Review Of MSN Bing
Microsofts latest offering- Bing, was unveiled to the international community on June 1st and has been its most recent attempts at snatching Googles, nearly 62% market share stranglehold in the Search Engine sector. With a stunning picture, lacing the Bing welcome screen each day, Microsoft certainly has continued with its debunked Live Search fundamentals of being as different from the plain Google as possible.
Bing was fomenting for a long time in Microsofts backyard and came out front after Microsofts ambitious takeover of Powersoft with its semantic search systems. Bing put those skills to good use with its results turning out pretty much, as accurate as Google on certain sets of keywords such as Paris Hilton or Arnold Schwarzenegger with an xRank feature indicating their popularity, But Bing does turn out some wonderfully vague results with more complex questions like I think Im going to die something Google avoids by bringing up links to self help pages.
Bing also offers a very snappy retort to Google with its modified Image search. Images are magnified by hovering over them and offer links to similar photos. Images can also be ordered by size, layout, color, style (photograph/illustration) or even by the heads or portraits of people! This helps you to selectively break down your image search to the one you need, while Google has a habit of being completely random with image searches.
Videos can be filtered by length, screen size, resolution, and a large range of sources (MSN, MTV, BBC, YouTube or Daily Motion). There’s also the cool feature of playing a video in parts simply by hovering your mouse while in the browser! Microsoft has worked the hardest at providing people with the data they need on important searches like Travel, Shopping and Health. Other websites offer only a dizzying array of links when you want to get an air ticket to Seattle, find a good Sushi Bar or need sound advice on your peanut allergies, but Bing actually searches, compiles and presents information in an ordered form with tabulated comparisons and reviews.
Using Bing Travel, you can actually find which airlines are cheaper and whether the prices would rise or fall. Shopping is a pleasure with user and expert reviews for every listing and every listing being a product itself with a Microsoft Cashback scheme in place, guaranteeing you with a discount on purchases made through Bing Shopping.
News is an area where Google wins hands down. Bing offers to break down searches into Location and Category, however Time tagged searches would have been much more powerful and would have given Bing a much more editorial feel Bing is Microsofts big splash into the heavily indexed market of information, which has been run by Google, for too long. Bing should offer Google some competition and force Google to improve its standards, which seem to be slipping these days. Though it is tough to wean away determined Googlers- keep an eye out for Bing