Bing Search Engine Testing

You may have seen that Microsoft has re-branded its live search as Bing.com. My first impressions on the name and the design are pretty good. It has a crisp fresh design and  looks a lot better than the tired MSN, Hotmail design which quite frankly after such a long time was just annoying. Bing is a better name. To me it is an onomatopoeia; the sound of an answer found.

Depending on which country you access Bing in you will see a different background  and it seems that we also get a different background every day.

While the look and feel is important, it is not as important as the results that get returned. How good is it at searching for things?

Typing in a random a query such as ‘central heating radiators‘ returns a good collection of results. They have adopted to show sponsored results along the top and the right-hand sidebar.

There is also a summary of the content that activates when the mouse pointer is rolled over the right hand  side of the search results page. I would have liked to have seen a screen shot of the site along with the summary of the text content but it is quite useful. This does mean that people will be able to see some of the content of a site before visiting it and this could circumvent people needing to visit a site if they find what they are looking for on the preview.

Images- the image search is pretty good with a layout and an automatic larger preview image coming into the fore when the mouse is hovered over the image.

Video search  is particularly nice to use as the preview results begin to play when the mouse is hovered over them, allowing you to see exactly what happens before deciding to watch it at its native resolution.

The verdict on Bing as a search engine is very good even though it is from Microsoft. This time they have actually created something which is a joy to use. Is it better than Google? It just might be. It does deserve to win a larger proportion of the search market. I will certainly give it an extended trial to see how it fares as my everyday search engine.