
Bing Is Live - jasonlbaptiste
http://www.bing.com/
======
iamelgringo
Wow. I just spent the last hour noodling around for different stuff, searching
for air fares, doing some shopping on Bing. It's actually really pretty nice.

Thoughts:

Bing shopping is much better than Froogle ever was. They are pushing the "cash
back" program pretty hard, and it will probably gain some traction.

Bing Video really doesn't show much YouTube content. That gives a bunch
different search results, which is kinda nice. The video preview is rather
helpful. Bing airfare shopping is now going to be my first stop for airfare
shopping. Really, really nice. Bing is now competing with Orbitz, Priceline,
Kayak, and doing a great job at it.

Bing image search is okay. Image search sucks in general, but it's nice to
have a third source for image searches (flikr being the other).

Bing maps are useable. Google maps is the clear winner.

Had anybody else aside from Microsoft just launched this product, it would
have been nothing short of amazing. People here would be very excited. Google
will still be #1, but at least now they have a serious competitor.

Microsoft just learned a whole bunch about making data centers and making
server operating systems run in large clusters. That's going to influence
their server OS game in a big way for the better.

~~~
aneesh
The funny thing is, most of this stuff isn't new. The integration is just
better.

Cashback launched about a year ago, and has been integrated into the product
search for months.

Infinite scroll on images is nice too, but that's been there as long as I can
remember.

Farecast (the airfare search engine) was acquired by Microsoft a while back,
and was part of Live.

------
breck
I really, really like it. I could actually _see myself using this_.

1\. Super fast.

2\. Image search is far superior to Google's.

3\. Travel search is great. Try "deals to hawaii".

4\. I like the name. Easy to remember and only 4 letters.

5\. Weather searches work great.

6\. I like the related searches and search history on the left.

7\. I like the wikipedia integration.

~~~
dmnd
What do you like about the Wikipedia integration? I don't see the value in
republishing Wikipedia:
[http://www.bing.com/reference/semhtml/Melbourne?q=melbourne&...](http://www.bing.com/reference/semhtml/Melbourne?q=melbourne&FORM=ZZRE)

~~~
ntoshev
I'm not in the USA and I can't get any Wikipedia integration ("deals to
hawaii" does nothing special either). Your link works though.

The quality of normal results (the only ones I can get) is bellow Google.

~~~
zkz
I could try it, using a vpn, from the US and outside the US.

From the US you get powerset-like answers to questions like "president of x".

------
pg
Too noisy. With all the extraneous stuff on the page, I keep misreading the
name as Bling.

Fast though. At least they understand that much about why Google won.

It's funny to think that after all the engineering expertise that must have
gone into this, they're going to lose because of UI design.

~~~
lucumo
I personally like the way they integrated the "advanced" search box in the
results page. It actually makes it _easy_ to do an advanced search. Neither
Yahoo nor Google has this.

Combined with the impressive speed, I think it stands a chance.

~~~
jsonscripter
Bing makes the advanced search "clickable" but always in your face.

Google gives you the advanced search options pane, and then shows you how to
format your search query so you can create the advanced search on-the-fly next
time (such as by adding -, +, quotes and the like), as they see the command-
line interface to their search as superior.

------
sachinag
First thing I did as a good SEO nerd/startup CEO was to see how Bing treated
<http://www.dawdle.com> \- and I have to say I'm mildly impressed, but
disappointed overall.

On the plus side for Bing, the hover-over shows the information we want the
user to see, and manages to highlight our five most popular platforms. (Not
the first five in our header, which is very impressive.) Google doesn't do the
site links for us, even though we've obeyed their best practices. This is good
for Bing.

But Bing doesn't do as well with restrictive searches - for example, Google
does significantly better than Bing for a search on [dawdle.com] - Bing strips
out the .com and treats it very similarly to a search on [dawdle], i.e.
treating it as a dictionary term. The [dawdle.com] search on Google brings up
a number of news/blog articles about the site.

Also, Bing utterly fails on e-commerce searching, even though they bought
Jellyfish and are pushing Cashback heavily. I tried [dawdle zelda] on both,
then clicked on "Shopping" for both. Here are the results:

[http://www.google.com/products?q=dawdle%20zelda&oe=utf-8...](http://www.google.com/products?q=dawdle%20zelda&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-
US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wf)

[http://www.bing.com/shopping/search?q=dawdle+zelda&mkt=e...](http://www.bing.com/shopping/search?q=dawdle+zelda&mkt=en-
US&FORM=BPFD)

I don't care what you say, a null set is just wrong. Now, yes, we do feed
Google Product Search, but that's Microsoft's fault - they shut down the free
feed test they had in favor of their paid Cashback search. Dawdle doesn't
participate in Cashback, so they don't get a feed. But to fail on that search
is crazy; it's on Shopping, and the user's inputted a product search term and
indicated a store preference. Google gets this exactly right. (Bing should
slurp the GPS feed anyway - the URL is indexable.)

~~~
dmnd
Being less specific gives you a pretty decent result, though. Try plain old
Zelda, then shopping: [http://www.bing.com/shopping/search?q=zelda&mkt=en-
US...](http://www.bing.com/shopping/search?q=zelda&mkt=en-US&FORM=BPFD)

------
potatolicious
Logo is well and truly terrible. It communicates nothing and belongs on a the
sign of a crappy downtown bistro than a professional web app.

Functionally it's disappointing. The context and use case-sensitive thing that
is hinted at in the preview video seems almost entirely absent. The preview
vid suggested that they will aggregate hotel information, flight information,
etc, to create a grander unified experience - I have not seen any of this.
Searching for hotels in a city doesn't give me anything except your
traditional search results.

The categories are well thought out - but undifferentiated from Google's
search term suggestions as it is.

Sadly, this launch seems a bit like the cuil launch - functionally incomplete,
but in the web world you really only get one launch.

~~~
encoderer
Ok.. i'll bite... what's so spectacular about the Google logo?

~~~
axod
For me, the irritation is the panther thingy in the background on search
results. It just looks like someone with no design sense found some clip art
and decided to put it there.

~~~
dhs
I didn't understand your comment until I enabled Javascript for the occasion
and found that they use photos. And corny ones, too; I'm looking at "Hot air
ballons over Cappadocia" (I still don't get the "panther thingy"; maybe
because I'm in Germany). Makes no sense at all to me - why would they want to
do that?

~~~
axod
Ah. In the UK we get a crappy clipart snow leopard. Looks terrible.

------
donaq
Searching for "linux download" on Bing turns up this as the #1 link:

<http://www.novell.com/linux/download_linux.html>

Trying the same thing on Google, however, I get this:

<http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download>

HMMM...

~~~
rarestblog
Actually, for me it gives: #1 <http://www.linux.com/download_linux> #2
<http://www.hungrypenguin.net/downloads.html> (which lists a lot of Linux
variants). #3 <http://www.linux.org/dist/download_info.html> there are also
direct links to Linux Mint, X Os Linux, Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux.

~~~
donaq
That's peculiar. Are the results skewed according to the geographical location
of the searcher, you think? I'm in Singapore.

------
lallysingh
Hmm, I wonder how much of the difference in search results come from people
intentionally gaming Google vs ignoring Bing/Live?

I did a sample search ("rack mount computers") and found 3 different areas for
ads on Bing and a single area (well, google shopping, which isn't 100% the
same thing) on Google. You'd think with this being MS, they'd burn
profitability (e.g. ads) in exchange for market size?

One good point for Bing, however: the results page isn't as 1994ish as Google.
Good use of color, less blaring blue-and-underlined text, and an actual
layout.

The nebula graphic, however, doesn't make any sense to me. I think Google's
pages could use an overhual -- not more stuff on there, just clean up the
colors and graphics a bit, like the ubuntu version of google's search page.

Edit: also, the hover box doesn't show up reliably for me (FF3, Opensolaris).
When it does show, it matches the background so well I hadn't noticed it until
others had mentioned it here.

Overall, a good point's made from this: the search game is probably going to
shift towards context sensitivity and user experience. General search is an
area where multiple parties (Google + MS) can do a decent job.

------
mattdennewitz
the homepage is nasty, and the search results page looks like the default spam
'search' page a domain squatter uses. the hover-triggered contexts, though,
are pretty fantastic.

~~~
chez17
I've been surprised how many people say it looks nice. I completely agree with
your statement. It looks straight from those fake search results on domains. I
thought the homepage was pretty weak too.

------
anigbrowl
Searched favorite obscure techno band. Returned Obscure Band homepage. Compare
Google: returns wikipedia page. Damn, everything I love is going mainstream.
Anyway, mildly impressed. Click top Bing result. Dead link. Accept Google's
suggestion. Redirected to actual live page. The end.

PS: My girlfriend asked if it they called it 'bing' because it makes a 'bing'
noise when you search. I laughed but then I thought this would be amusing.
Anybody know how would I set about doing such a thing? I'm not a web coder.

~~~
davidw
> because it makes a 'bing' noise when you search.

I can't help thinking of the Monty Python sketch about "The Machine that goes
'Ping'".

------
cubicle67
Results vastly different from Google. I decided to compare the query I've just
run in Google:

<http://www.bing.com/search?q=creative+commons+sound+effects>

[http://www.google.com/search?q=creative+commons+sound+effect...](http://www.google.com/search?q=creative+commons+sound+effects)

There's very little overlap in the first page results, and freesound.org, #1
in Google, doesn't even make Bing's first page.

~~~
endtwist
I see freesound.org as #1 on Bing. I'll be honest, though, the first two pages
of results on Bing look as good -- or better -- than Google's results.

~~~
greendestiny
I see 5 results from creativecommons.org as the top in bing, but thats as an
Australian. When you switch it to US, its freesound. Even as US bing shows 3
results from dvguru that appear to be spam. It also shows 3 results from
creativecommons, 2 of which appear to be somewhat un-useful, and the 1 other
useful one appears on both google and bing.

I'd definitely call that search a win for google. There are far more useful
sources of creative commons sound effects in google's first page.

------
rms
If you were the marketing company and had 100MM to market this, what would you
do?

~~~
gojomo
$100 million is apparently the marketing budget 'magic number' to prove you're
serious relaunching your search engine... and has been for 10 years. From
October 1999:

<http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-231154.html>

 _"Internet investment firm CMGI plans to spend more than $100 million on a
12-month advertising campaign that trumpets major changes aimed at
transforming its AltaVista Web directory into a top-tier portal player,
sources say."_

Alas, the ad blitz didn't do much to revive AltaVista, and it won't be the
size of the marketing campaign spend that determines what happens for Bing.

------
thorax
If I type "es_msg" into Bing I get exactly what I'd expect, the documentation
for a function. When I type it into Google I get "did you mean tos_msg" which
drives me batty. And the top two results are useless. The third result is
correct.

Bing's "Help" is actually really nice and very fast (in Chrome). Or at least I
found it easy to navigate through it.

Bing isn't indexing bug.gd error/solutions properly, though, so that's a bit
frustrating.

Bing is definitely very fast. Sometimes felt faster than Google.

~~~
randomtask
When I type es_msg into Google I too get the "did you mean" link, but the top
result is the same as the Bing result.

Yes, Bing does feel really fast, but it's not like I've often felt like I was
waiting too long for a Google result.

~~~
thorax
I mean the "Did you mean" top two results-- it gives me two results about
"tos_msg" which are useless for the particular query and mess me up pretty
much every day on other queries.

~~~
randomtask
Ah, I didn't get those. Fair enough.

------
oldgregg
Well at least they are not trying to copy google by having a simple UI. The
horsehead nebula will not rescue microsoft search.

What a disappointment.

~~~
encoderer
Actually... i took it thru some paces... search some obscure mysql error
messages, python function names, my name, unit conversions, etc..

The results are exactly what I expect, as good (or nearly so) as Google.

The only exception being advanced query syntax: wildcards in phrases, the ".."
range operator, etc. But that's something I can forgive on day 1...

~~~
axod
You don't win by being nearly as good as your competitor though.

~~~
encoderer
Oh come on, it's day 1... I can't say Bing will gain traction or not. But, at
the very least, on day one, it's the 2nd best search engine available.

~~~
axod
The search results seem like pretty much the same as they have been for years.
This is just a rebranding and some UI fluff as far as I can see. So yeah, it's
day 1 for the new UI, but I was talking about quality of search results.

------
niyazpk
Did anyone try this?
[http://www.bing.com/search?q=google&go=&form=QBRE...](http://www.bing.com/search?q=google&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all)

An ideal search engine should return exactly one result!

------
ErrantX
Excellent stuff TBH, it does the job in a nice speedy way.

2 Issues.

\- the name is awful. really bad. I can "get" the inspiration ("bing and your
search is done") but it clearly was a guy in a suit who likes to wave his
hands about and yell WICKED alot who came up with it. Baaaaad. :)

\- the layout is a bit clunky. Huge graphic on the main page seems to serve no
purpose. Will they be rotating that? ON the search results page the list is
offset from the left. That feels wrong (might just be due to google habit) and
hard to scan. Also the results column could be wider.

Other than that - seems usable!

~~~
jodrellblank
_bing and your search is done_

Curiously, I searched for a youtube video and the Bing summary says

"Sorry for the interruption. We have been receiving a large volume of requests
from your network. To continue with your YouTube experience, please enter the
verification code below."

Has their spider been abusing Youtube.com?

------
psyklic
The search seems fine -- but the look/logo/UI is terrible. And come on, do
they really need to spam the search pages with so many conspicuous
advertisements that LOOK like the search results? If they want this product to
stick, they need to make the search results stand out ...

------
sker
I don't know, I like it. Results are very on par with Google's. Interface is
cleaner, now that Google has a rating system and a lot of other info/links per
result.

Only thing I don't like is that I can only set 50 results per page, whereas
with Google and Yahoo I can set 100.

I'm gonna set it as my homepage for a few days. That's the only way I'll be
able to give it a try and come up with a judgment.

------
pedalpete
it isn't intuitively different from Google, and that is a disappointment. I
understand that they have done a bunch of UI stuff which is supposed to make
it a better search service, but what exactly are these?

The hover-triggered contexts don't really provide me with much more than the
summary below the title. Seems redundant.

The left navigation bar I thought was supposed to have a bunch of cool
features. I'm only seeing my search history. That may be a nice to have, but
it isn't a game changer.

The snow leopard is awful, and isn't that the Mac line of products?

------
zaidf
This is what my first query returned:
<http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/5466/query1.jpg>

~~~
jsz0
In fairness did you search for question mark, door, question mark, question
mark?

~~~
zaidf
no.

------
czstrong
I really like the bird's eye view that they offer with their maps. It is much
more detailed and usable than the normal satellite view. You can rotate the
view 90 degrees to get 4 different angles of the location and it zooms in
close.

~~~
anirudh
Again as a poster mentioned above, this has also been available from atleast 4
years. It seems that they have done a good job bringing it all together and
people are atleast exposed to these now.

------
jsz0
Seems to provide, more or less, the same results as Google on the searches I
tested.

Seems to provide less search options/customiations than Google. (unless I'm
missing it?)

Lacks moderation of search results. (hide/promote/comments)

Seems to lack a separate category for searching news.

Video search with hover-play thumbnails is nice but no description?

The links to MSN & Live at the top amuse me for some reason.

Overall it seems to be a good replication of where Google was about 2 years
ago. I'd say when they set it as the default homepage in Windows a lot of
people will continue to use it since it's "good enough"

------
10ren
Microsoft maps is surprisingly good: they have a "bird's eye" view for urban
areas, which is startling close. It also doesn't lock up my eeePC after a few
minutes, like Google maps does.

I was shocked that the top-left options feel _exactly_ as if it was google to
me (though they differ slightly). It's as though I thought that layout was
owned (trademarked) by Google.

    
    
        Web Images Videos News Maps More
        Web Images Video  Maps News Shopping Gmail more

------
andrewljohnson
I took it through the paces.

As usual, it is good at finding queries where not many pages apply.

But for competitive search terms, they don't sort the it right.

Better than Live though... give it 5 more years.

------
thorax
Here's a quick GreaseMonkey script to "fix" the results page layout for
chronic Google addicts:

<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50649>

Basically moved the results more against the left side and the "aside" bar is
moved to the right.

Layout may be a little touchy as I did this more for demonstration than
anything else.

------
dschobel
It's fast enough and the results are good enough that I made it my default
search engine for the day. This is no small feat, most of the new engines
(Cuil, et al) don't get this far.

\------------------------

My 90 second road-test

I actually prefer the search results UI to google's. It's clean and I'm really
digging the smart side-bars.

1a. A search for "python" yields a sidebar with sections for "Overview,
Community, Software, Development"

1b. Google gives me a list of results

2a. "Zurich" yields a sidebar with "Weather, Map, Real Estate, Travel,
Restaurants"

2b. Google gives me an embedded map, and then a list of results.

\------------------------

It's a small difference which obviously Google could replicate but at this
point in search, the results from all the big players seem to be converging at
"very good" so UI is really the only place to innovate anymore and I have to
give it to MS on this one.

We'll see how it holds up to daily use but so far, I'm quite impressed.

------
cowmoo
Did anyone else who is using FF3 on Windows Vista w/ Flash Debugger installed
get crashes when you try to mouse-over a video preview on a music video/artist
search?

I think the issue is caused by improper exception handling in the way that
Bing's video preview tries to retrieve frames of preview thumbnails, but it
can't find any for the source. The QA might not have caught it with a release
version of Flash, but it's an issue for web dev's with the debugging version
of Flash player. I know that Bing is in "preview" edition, but someone should
file the bugs with Microsoft.

------
jrnkntl
Am I the only one seeing a Snow Leopard as the background image?

~~~
dmnd
The background images are different for different markets.
<http://www.bing.com/?mkt=en-us> <http://www.bing.com/?mkt=en-uk>

------
bowman
What is with the "Tool Tips" for the search box and the search button? Tool
Tips should only be used when a button needs explaining and never for text
boxes IMO.

------
dbul
Search: Conelly

 _Show just the results for Conelly._

    
    
      1. Connelly Skiis
    

(I then click 'Show just the results for Conelly')

    
    
      1. Connelly Skiis

~~~
encoderer
Or the Connelly Skiis page is in the index under "Conelly" legitimately? (via
text on the page or, most likely, the text of links pointing to it)

~~~
dbul
Fun to contrast with Google:

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Conelly](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Conelly)

Hey, look at that, it works.

------
ShardPhoenix
Hmm, I'm getting a nice picture of Santorini here (Australia), not a nebula or
a panther.

Overall it seems pretty decent - the results are quite different from Google
on some queries, but not necessarily in a bad way, and it's just as fast.

------
chanux
Quite impressed of bing.

\+ Nice to see MS actually start to working with open source.

\+ They've learned from Google.

\+ The representation of image search results is good.

\+ Video search is also good.

\- The name doesn't really rock.

\- MS still has to learn a bit about simplicity.

\- Search results are still same as bad old live?

------
Elepsis
For those of you who have clearly not used live.com in the past year and a
half they've been doing this, there is no "nebula obsession" -- the photo
changes daily along with the facts.

------
tybris
Yay, finally found something I have been looking for for the past 3 days.
Thanks for not stripping terms from my query! Not as good as Google used to
be, but my new #1 stop for search.

------
chanux
Bing logo reminds me <http://blinkx.com> logo. The favicons look lot alike.

------
donniefitz2
It's not bad. It's worth trying out anyway and appears to be much better than
the previous Live search.

------
tomerico
The snippets from large sites such as IMDB and Amazon, are simply fantastic.
Far better than Google.

------
Emore
A search for 'bing' does not return Bing itself, at least not in the first 4
pages. Interesting.

~~~
endtime
Did you look at the part at the top, where it says "Best match"? It's easy to
miss because it's kind of positioned where an ad would be on Google.

------
spectre
The input box seems to be covering the region filter (using FF3.0 on linux)
for non US versions.

------
judegomila
There suggestions sucks and its full some basic UI issues.

Whats the obsession with nebula?

The image searcher is decent though.

------
timothychung
I can see that they have embraced Google now. Maybe next is to extend and
extinguish?

------
alexbosworth
"We did not find any results for microsoft."

not terribly impressed...

------
seshagiric
its a huge improvement over previous live search. One more to add to my
'search sources':

google, wikipedia and now bing.

------
trezor
I have to say to whoever tries this, make sure to set bing to "United States -
English" mode as opposed to whatever default localization it applies. The
difference is quite stunning.

While I realize in the long term, you will need localized data for wherever
you live for queries to be more useful, if you want to get a test of the
technological platform and how it differs from google, chances are you wont
see many until you set it to US-mode.

------
ilyak
Doesn't work in Konqueror 3.5.10.

Google does :)

------
riffic
polishing turds, as usual.

