It is too early to say whether or not Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine) is more hype or substance. They are certainly pulling out all the stops for marketing it including a live infomercial on Hulu next Monday at 8:00 PM ET.
Google is probably safe for now but I do like the way that Bing offers an expanded result synopsis pop-up in the right column as one rolls over the vertical line and dot on the right. The site is live and worth a try.
PS – Shane O’Neill reviews Bing and offers “5 features that give it a chance against Google” in this CIO article.
On first glance, I was also impressed. It looks more attractive and the results page looks less cluttered. The mouse over info boxes on the homepage image is pretty cool too. I have switched it to my default search engine to try it out for awhile.
I used it this morning for video search. The video search options out there are not impressive. Even YouTube, owned by Google, struggles with this. Bing is my new video search engine. The query pulled relevant results, while it was aesthetically pleasing, and all you have to do is roll over the video thumbnail and it plays! The image search is also nice. The web queries seemed to be no different than the live.com search though there are image rollovers and it is looks better.
A couple of other thoughts, yes, Google still seems to have more relevant web search results and I couldn’t find an RSS feed for search queries in Bing. I’ll probably be using both of them.
And now Google has upped the ante with Google Squared. It’s not a fit for all searches but tries to provide two dimensions to search results and gives the user flexiblity to add or delete rows and columns in the results column. Try the suggested searches to get a feel for how it works.