

Bing revamps its search page with much cleaner design - error54
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/01/bing-redesigned-search-results/

======
haberman
It's funny, I've noticed myself using the links in the "cluttered left rail"
an awful lot lately. Particularly the "past month" / "past year" links; for so
much tech stuff anything over a year old is just not useful. It pertains to
previous versions of software/hardware, or to services that have changed their
feature set in the meantime.

~~~
hdctambien
A couple questions:

1) Do you click the sponsored links in search results? 2) Do you run adblock?

Maybe you and I (and anyone else reading this board) are not the target market
for Bing. I don't watch Wheel of Fortune either, but that seems to have a
strong market.

The less links/buttons on a page to confuse my mother the more likely I'll
send her to that page. As long as she can easily find what she is looking for
(and is less likely to install _another_ browser toolbar)

Here are some searches that worked perfectly fine for me in Bing and didn't
need any sidebar filters:

<http://www.bing.com/search?q=celtics+score> (shows the box score)

<http://www.bing.com/search?q=newton%2C+ma+taxi> (same map/list of taxi
companies as google)

<http://www.bing.com/search?q=who+won+american+idol> (I think Bing has better
results than Google for this)

<http://www.bing.com/search?q=movie+times> (fandango outranked Bing's list of
movies, while Google puts their list ahead of all search results)

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wanderr
Here's the problem with using a not-Google search engine: any time I have
trouble finding something, I feel compelled to switch back to Google to make
absolutely sure that it really is that hard to find. So while I've tried to
use other search engines by default, it just ends up being more efficient to
start with Google.

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seldo
Wow. A couple of side-by-side searches, and I've switched to Bing to try it
out for the next few days.

I've got really tired of Google's cruft, and tried DuckDuckGo several times,
but the results were just never as good (and I missed integrated image and
news searches, both of which I use heavily). Bing's results seem much closer
to what I expect.

~~~
ma2rten
That would be really bad, because DDG is a search engine on top of the Bing
API.

~~~
seldo
Well, boy do I feel dumb.

~~~
ch0wn
It's not just Bing results. They use their results instead of running their
own content crawlers, but they use some own algorithms for ranking, spam
filtering and so on. Also, Bing is not their only source, if I'm not mistaken.

~~~
mda
I wonder what percentage of ddg results come from bing, is this information
public?

~~~
Johnyma22
I wonder how DDG are going to respond to the proposed changes to the Bing API
pricing

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burnblue
Am I the only one who is bothered by how similar the Bing results look to
Google results?

To illustrate my point, one of these is Bing and one is Google:
<http://d.pr/i/4KA5>

Does this not cross an ethical line?

~~~
Negitivefrags
Your UI is not generally the thing you should be innovating with. The purpose
of a UI is to be intuitive. The most intuitive thing for a user is the thing
they already know.

I work in game development, and this kind of thing comes up a lot. For
example, if your going to make a console FPS, you should make damn sure your
controls are as similar as possible to Call of Duty and when people make the
user interface for an MMO these days, they should probably start with whatever
WoW's UI is doing.

When you are looking at a decision like "What colour should I make these item
rarities" you might think it's a good idea to change them just to be different
from a competitor, but why change for the sake of change?

UI improvements can certainly be made, but you have to balance them against
familiarity, which is a huge factor that shouldn't be discounted. Remember
that in any product, the UI is a means to an end, not the thing itself. If
Bing wants to innovate, they should do so by providing better search results.

------
rachelbythebay
I noticed this tonight as well. I never thought Bing would be the "clean,
simple" result page, while Google was overcome with cruft. Absolutely amazing.

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rkudeshi
Is it just me or is this better than anything Google's ever had? (both before
and after Search Plus Your World)

If Bing can do a better job with long tail queries, I could definitely see
myself recommending to family to use Bing.

------
5h
"cluttered left rail" ... sure, cluttered with things that get a helluva lot
of use & happen to be located in a very convenient place.

~~~
drivebyacct2
And those options don't exist _anywhere_ on Bing... unless you have to be
logged or something strange.

~~~
5h
not sure if this was intended as sarcasm, so I logged in just to check, no
they dont,

they have related searches (in bold), search history & narrow by region down
the left...

all but the last go in the "cruft" category imho,

google have the different search types, location, region, chronological stuff
then "more", no idea how much customisation they do though ... i'm not a
google-fanboy but at least they are all useful _to me_ & better designed

------
tar
Bing seems to be becoming more and more like the clean and simple Google I
liked.

~~~
tathagatadg
I can see on the UI side definitely! dejavu Google a few years back ... but
how about search quality? I have tried using Bing, but 99.9% I'll be back on
Google after a few iterations of using different keywords.

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seshagiric
Actually the Tech crunch screenshot does not do much justice. The new bing
search result page is really clean and appealing (in addition to search
results).

------
tathagatadg
A friend of mine who runs what I suspect is nothing other than a content farm,
told me last year that he doesn't do SEO for Bing - simply because it doesn't
fetch him money. More precisely, his clients want SEO for google ... I suspect
the reality is much different, as many IE users would stick to using it. Does
anyone know how lucrative Bing is on the SEO market, and how Bing handles such
efforts?

~~~
AznHisoka
It's not lucrative, but for most people, optimizing for Google = optimizing
for Bing and most other search engines as well. There's really not much
difference - maybe you need to come up with a different sitemap, but that's
it.

------
k-mcgrady
Nice redesign but the results just aren't good enough. For some searches they
match Google but for just as many they fail.

e.g. I searched for a GitHub repo I created. On Bing I got one results. A blog
post I wrote about it. On Google I got 77 results including the GitHub
project, GitHub Wiki, blog post, and tweets about it. I've also noticed in
using Bing that when I type in programming questions I get blog posts. On
Google I get StackOverflow which is what I'm usually looking for. I think I'm
going to give Bing a try for a few days though exclusively and see how it
really compares.

Competing on design is great especially as Google's search has got so
cluttered but the results are still the most important thing.

~~~
simonz05
Look at github.com/robots.txt and you'll see there is no bingbot listed there.
I'm not sure if this affects the result in your query, but it might well just
be a case of bing respecting a robots.txt file.

~~~
chucknthem
Actually, it has msnbot listed, and according to this
[http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive...](http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2010/06/28/bing-
crawler-bingbot-on-the-horizon.aspx)

The bingbot will respect msnbot permissions when it doesn't see bingbot,
unless of course github has explicitly blocked unrecognized user agents too.

------
olalonde
I had not used Bing for a while so I tried a simple search for "hacker news"
to compare the results with Google.

Bing:
[http://www.bing.com/search?q=hacker+news&go=&qs=n...](http://www.bing.com/search?q=hacker+news&go=&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=hacker+news&sc=8-2&sp=-1&sk=)

Google: [https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#...</a><p>I
guess I will stick with Google... I like the redesign though.

------
robryan
On one hand people complain that google does to much guessing to what you mean
with your query, in the other people complain when they get to much control
via the left bar..

------
sparknlaunch12
Have Microsoft revamped bing to prepare it for sale?

~~~
j_col
Bingo! I heard a rumour it might be Facebook.

~~~
sparknlaunch12
It's strange that Microsoft would want to off load Bing. I know Facebook
supposedly have some decent search capability already. Maybe Bing would
complement a Facebook type OS?

~~~
tathagatadg
And Facebook seems close with Baidu too - phone or launching fb in China,
whatever it is. Would be surprised if Facebook buys it actually ...

------
sparknlaunch12
The two look almost identical. In fact bing now looks more like google, minus
a left rail. I actually find google left menu pretty useful.

------
Teapot
Seems bloat and clutter AdBlock filter for Bing looks like this now,

    
    
      |http://db3.api.bing.com
      |http://c.bing.com/c.gif
      |http://www.bing.com/az/*
      |http://www.bing.com/fd/hpk2/*
      |http://www.bing.com/fd/s/a/*.png
      |http://www.bing.com/favicon.ico
      |http://www.bing.com/s/wlflag.ico
      |http://www.bing.com/fd/ls/GLinkPing*
    
    .

------
handzhiev
Bing is good. But few things I really really miss in them are convenient
searches like:

55 f in c

1200 USD in JPY

25 liters in gallons

etc

In Google these give me the answer. In Bing they give me links.

~~~
chucknthem
Hm...maybe these answers aren't enabled in your country/region. All those
searches gave me answers on Bing set to en-us

------
rkwz
It seems it doesn't work in India. It works if you set your country to US.

------
UIZealot
I am going to give Bing a try, as I noticed that loading a Google page puts an
extra ~10% CPU usage on Firefox ever since they integrated that Google+ crap.

------
Mjux
Anyone from Bing team to explain the shift, why focus on these particular set
(changes)?

------
drivebyacct2
1\. We're choosing search engines now because of appearance?

2\. User styles.

3\. If you don't like the options Google gives you or it annoys you to see
them on the side, okay. But blaming it on social search is disingenuous.
Social search added a single toggle button that is off in the corner away from
results.

The left search bar stuff is standard fare and has been there for ages.

~~~
moconnor
Appearance is _everything_ in information graphic design - and that's what a
search engine results page _is_. It's an interface between the raw data and my
brain, feeding it with information. A better design increases bandwidth and
decreases latency. Both of those make the viewer subjectively happier for a
wide variety of reasons.

So yes, appearance is an extremely good reason to switch search engines.

~~~
drivebyacct2
I'm flabbergasted at this. Either one of two things are happening here:

1\. The results returned by Google and Bing are equally good, and so the only
thing remaining is the "noise" on the page.

2\. The "noise" in the column is so distracting that you are willing to go
elsewhere regardless of the quality of the content that you are... "able" to
see?

The search results themselves are formatted, basically _identically_. The only
difference is Google has a bit more stuff up top and on the left side on
Google. Just set the origin of your vision to be the div containing the search
results.

Or take 10 seconds and install a user style. It will take a fraction of the
time you spent flipping back to Google to redo a search. (At least that's been
my own experience with trying to switch).

Additionally, in regards to visual bandwidth, the Google results are tighter
(yet still comfortable), don't have "Related Links" shoved into the middle of
search results, and the site (map) links under the result don't take up an
enormous space like they do in Bing (they more than double the vertical height
of the result).

(as a side note, it appears to be completely impossible to do an "advanced"
(date/language-constrained) search with Bing. If you guys don't use these
options on Google, you absolutely must try them. They are invaluable when
doing any non-trivial query)

