Last December Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted regarding their new privacy policy which, consequently, doesn’t really include much privacy at all. Schmidt was quoted saying “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.” For some time? Try 180 days. Scary stuff, to say the least. Even Mozilla’s Director of Community Development was encouraging users to switch to Bing. And yes, Bing’s privacy policy is better than Google’s at this point. That got me thinking, why not Bing?
Believe it or not Microsoft has hit a huge home run with its new search engine “Bing!”. I have to say I was pretty skeptical at first about trying it, I mean after all I can’t remember a time where those rainbow o’s in Goooogle weren’t the first thing to greet me when I power up my ThinkPad. Hell, they’re even sort of, um well, comforting in a weird way. Well, I guess it’s not that weird when you consider how much time the average American teen spends on the internet a week: 30, count them 3-0, hours. Anyways, after years of letting Google’s search engine dominate my internet experience I thought I’d give Bing a try. So far, I really like it. Don’t worry though Google, I haven’t abandoned you yet, but there are a few new tricks Bing’s search engine could teach you. Sergey and Larry, you listening?
To be fair to both engines I used an equally random search term when comparing the two: “King of The Hill” (as in the television show), while researching for an upcoming post about one of my favorite shows. Here’s a breakdown of some of Bing’s cooler new features:
- -Visual Search
- -Collaboration with Yahoo search
- -A ‘preview’ function when you hover a search result
- -Full Hulu integration (from what I can tell)
This looks familiar. iTunes cover flow anyone?
I’ll elaborate on the visual search feature first and work my way down. This is one of the newer features of Bing and is still tagged as ‘Beta’–needless to say there is some limited functionality still– I think the idea however, is fantastic. In this day and age of iTunes cover flow, widgets, and live wallpapers I think Bing is doing exactly what search engines need to: represent information graphically. This is definitely a feature you won’t find in Google searches and I think holds a lot of potential. Visual search defnitely falls short once you get past the idea of it and into the functionality of it. To start there is only seven different categories available right now, and its not really a ‘search’ in the way were used to thinking of searching. That’s to say, you can’t just type in the thing your looking for in the search box, click ‘visual search’, and have all the results pop up with cool looking interactive thumbnails, but that is (hopefully) the potential. Rather, you’re pretty much restricted to browsing through sports, travel, geography, shopping, reference, online media (restricted to only searching iphone apps), entertainment, and famous people. If you were looking for something in one of those seven categories, then its not that bad of an option, and if you like iTunes’ ‘cover flow’ option and are looking for, say, Billboards top 40 hits right now, you’ll like it even better. All in all, visual search is cool, but not ready to convince me to switch to Bing as my default search engine alone.
And then we have Microsoft’s acquisition of the Yahoo search engine. This doesn’t really change much except Microsoft has that much more data it can feed through when you search for something, but even together Bing still doesn’t have more searching power, necessarily, than Google. The only really notable thing about this acquisition is that at one point there were very speculative rumors that Microsoft might try and take market shares of every major search engine but Google in an attempt to knock out Google’s majority stake in the search engine sphere. Looks like the internet’s corporate big brother might be back and better than ever, which doesn’t really bother me because Google, despite putting on the façade and feel of being a small, liberal start-up in silicon valley, has become a bigger corporate presence than anyone could have imagined. I say give Microsoft a chance, but maybe that’s just the Windows 7 in me talking…
No more link let downs.
Another really notable feature of Bing that really sets it apart from Google search is what I’m calling the ‘visual preview’ feature. This allows the user to hover over the search entry and a small preview screen of the site will pop up before clicking the link or even allow you to refine the search further by searching within that site before going to it. This seems rather inconsequential and not necessarily that revolutionary at first, but trust me its really useful. I never really realized how much time I waste clicking links in Google when researching something only to find out that the meager two sentence description under the link in the Google search page completely led me astray. If had a nickel for every time I pressed my ‘back’ button…
That brings me to the coolest new feature of Bing: Hulu video intregration and live video previews. Here you can see what the video functions of Google and Bing are side by side for the search term ‘King of the Hill”. Bing, almost instinctively, pulled up full-length Hulu videos.
What’d Google pull up? An original pencil sketch of the show, a video from ‘ebaumsworld’, and a documentary about a Canadian baseball player Ferguson Jenkins; not quite what I was looking for, nice try Google.
Google Video or....
Even better, hovering over the videos in Bing gives you a couple second video preview of the link you are bout to click on, once again saving my browser’s back button from breaking. Hell, you can even limit the videos by provider: Hulu, Youtube, Vimeo etc… The media functions in Bing are just really intuitive and easy to use, they definitely seem to be geared more towards mainstream media consumption, but that’s actually ok. Bing is doing a really good job innovating new features for how we search media and organize our searches.
Bing Video?
Google, however, still prevails as King of Search, for now that is. There is just too many Google services that are too great for Bing to really, at this point and time at least, detract from Google’s long-time user fan base. Microsoft has a long way to go if they want to start cutting into Google’s market share: maps, web browsing, images, Google reader, Google Fast Flip, Google Wave, and so on. That list is growing by the day too. I have to say though, I’m glad to see what you’ve been doing lately Microsoft—kudos, keep it up!
