Bing search page
Microsoft launched its BING on June 3rd. It claims that it is not a mere search engine but more of a decision engine. Bing would help people in making decisions on travel, health, shopping etc. It isn’t the first time Microsoft has come up with a search engine. I read somewhere (can’t recollect exactly where) that Microsoft had offered the people “special benefits” to use the previous search engine…hahahhaah 🙂
Well I “binged” a little ( 😀 😀 ). The search results aren’t that different from Google (but of course that’s quite obvious!!). Bing has a picture as a background which would change everyday, while Google maintains a clean white background. The font of the “GOOGLE” text, though, changes from time to time depending on season or occasion, etc. Everyone knows what Google looks like and how it works so am not getting into it. Bing and Google have almost the same search options (web, images, video, etc). What I liked about Bing is that, it has the “Search History” on the left hand panel. I think that is a good feature. When you search for an image e.g. tweety, you get a list of images right?. On clicking an image, the other remaining images get listed out on the left hand panel… 🙂 nice…You can also set your search preferences like location, safe search (level at which you want your search to filter out sexual text, images, etc), language and more. On the background picture, you also have links of places you may wanna find out more about. But most of these features are limited to US(English) country. Many features are missing when you change your country to any other. My understanding is that it is because the sites for other countries are still in Beta stage.
Your travel plan is just a click away. But this isn’t of your interest unless you are planning a travel to/from US. I hope they are working on incorporating the same feature for other countries too.
Google Vs Bing at Indiatimes.
To talk about decision engine…I think Google is providing no less. I mean at the end, after all the researching, it is the sole responsibility of an individual to take his/her own decision.
Well I am yet to find out more about Bing, so I’ll leave it at this point. Let’s see how it works for Microsoft.
Do you think Bing will outdo Google? Feel free to vote!!
Hanou's Blog 
I guess we need to see some more useful features in Bing… And as you said ‘it is the sole responsibility of an individual to take his/her own decision’
decision engines need to be more “event” specific… and Bing is no where near to it.
When I googled “Calvin and hobbes + hanou”, I found my blog site the first in the list…but when I did the search on Bing, I couldn’t find my blog site at all 😦 😦 …even after changing the country to India!!
The only thing would be weird, that is the use of the word “Bing”, just like u say “I am Googling” or “I’ll Google that” u would now say …what??…. “I am BINGING” or “I’ll BING that” ????
The results are very different when you search in bing and then google.
But still Bing has taken everyone by surprise.It has not been able to topple Google but yes it has come up to second after google! which is good enough!
@Anjan: I totally agree! the name “Bing” is way far from being a catchy word. here’s an interesting article on the name “Bing” http://www.aeroxp.org/2009/05/why_bing_name_destined_to_fail/
@Manmeet: my mistake there..I had done a search on something (don’t remember what) and found almost the same results. But later, when I did a lot more searching, the results were different. They say that Google has more understanding of where traffic is originating from, and will favor results for your home country. Well I tried changing the country in Bing and compared the results. For some they were similar and not so similar for others.
WHO THE HELL NEEDS YET ANOTHER SEARCH ENGINE???
As far as any MS product is concerned, they are quite uninnovative. the only reason they have brought this out is because many people fall for MS product like suckers specially when they are packed with windows’ latest version. just look at silverlight (copy of flash), IE (v8 copies all firefox features like tab and sessions!!!). and now they want to copy google? and what is with the wallpaper shit? who need it while searching for some web page?
one thing both engines lack is the ability to check image content without the use of any meta data inside it. any search engine that can do that will be the next generation’s “google”. and keep all the malicious websites out of the search list, for god’s sake!