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Bing – first impressions

Its official: Microsoft will not go with “Kumo” but with “Bing” in their renewed attempt to snatch away some of Google's giant market share. In my eyes, the name might not be the perfect fit but it's definitely a better pick than the present “Live Search”.

Just to be clear: Bing is no “Google Killer”. With Bing, Microsoft put together a searchengine with a solid quality of results, which caught up to Google in large parts but which can only best the market leader in a few areas. I was able to take a look at Bing before the launch and I want to show a few features and new ideas with the help of some screenshots. We start with the homepage; it seems that they are changing the “background image” on a daily basis to add some variety:


Sadly, Microsoft repeats the same mistake they made years ago: at the moment, Bing is only fully functional in the USA. Other, not-so-minor markets like Germany will have to make do with a noticeably reduced version, which reminds you more of the current Live-search. They are working on fixing this at full speed but they are not going to make it in time for the launch date. The following screenshots are therefore from the US version of Bing, coupled with the hopes, that we will also get these features in Europe in the foreseeable future.

In the search for “Bonn” (here the screenshot of the full page, 325kb), we will first notice, how the results are arranged into two columns. To the left of the actual results, we are shown further perimeters – if, like for this example, some are found that fit exceptionally well, they will be sorted like a navigational bar (Images, Map, Weather, etc.), otherwise we will only be shown the “Related Searches”. Below those, you can see the last few queries you typed in, so you are able to quickly jump back to previous searches. It is commendable, that you are able to disable the storing of this data right there; with Google, you have to sift through numerous menus to turn off the annoying Webhistory.

The actual SERPs, framed by specifically marked advertisements, start out with five fitting pictures from the imagesearch. Right there, you are able to narrow down your search further, if you are only looking for large pictures or those in black and white.



After the images, there are five results from the “normal” index. Microsoft came up with something new for Wikipedia-results: instead of showing the classical cache-version, they are now showing a link to the Wikipedia-content in the Bing-layout, which is marked as “Enhanced View”; the same is also linked in the navigation through “Reference”. When you move the mouse over one of the results, you will get a continuation of the SERPs textsnippet to the right of it. This is a nice idea as far as searchengines are concerned, though siteoperators will now have to come up with a way to distribute relevant content, so that those searching will still have a reason to visit the site, instead of just getting the answers they want right in the SERPs.



Below those results, there are three results each from the searches that have already been highlighted in the navigation: Bonn Maps, Bonn Weather, Bonn Airport, Bonn Hotels and Bonn History. From the user point-of-view, I like this because it adds quite some variety to the results; from a SEO-point-of-view this is naturally not so nice, seeing how this means one thing more than ever: only positions 1-3 count. Other features are, in parts, closely related to the big role model: the local results for “Bonn Hotels” should be familiar to Google-users and the integrated Weather-information is also not something completely unknown. The shopping-area, which makes sense not to be shown for this search, is nicely enriched though data from Ciao, which was bought by Microsoft last year: prices, testimonies, comparisons and in the USA also the popular cashbacks.

All in all, this is a noticeable advancement from the current state of Microsoft's searchengine and if these nice features, which we can only marvel at in the USA, at the moment, find their way to our side of the Atlantic, then I can imagine that this, in combination with the large rumored advertisement budget that Microsoft is allocating for Bing, will cause their marketshare to grow by quite a bit.

Comments & Trackbacks

Rob Abdul - - 26.06.2009 15:44
I don't think that Bing will be successful until Microsoft sort out their indexing issues.

For example, sites that have almost all their pages indexed in Google have barely 20% indexed in Bing.

Therefore Bing is not seeing most of the web.

I wish Microsoft would sort this out - they have millions at their disposal and the brightest people working for them.