What is Bing? It's basically a search engine like Yahoo and Google. Why would we need yet another search engine when there are already two great options out there? Well, Microsoft has released Bing as a different kind of search engine. It's being promoted not as a search engine but as a "decision engine". Unlike other search engines, one feature it has is that it provides the ability to preview a site before visiting which can save time (shown below).
What does Bing have to offer that is different from other search tools?
Power Shopping
At the heart of everyone's wallet is savings. Bing offers a cashback service which allows you to search for products and compare prices. If you purchase through Bing they boast of cashback opportunities of up to $2,500 annually. Earnings are typically posted to your account within 60 days of earning the cashback reward. The ability to compare and sort products based on a bottom line price is available.
In addition to the cashback service, a search will provide a user with product reviews, ratings, and prices for each product.
Travel Tools
Microsoft's acquisition of farecast has allowed them to provide a great travel tool with Bing. If you're searching for plane tickets, and you enter "flights from detroit to san francisco" Bing will present you with a "cheap tickets" link that shows fare predictions and a calendar that shows how the price may vary depending on your departure and return dates. If you continue into the Bing Travel interface, you can compare prices from multiple travel sites, and even see the best time of day to schedule your flight to get the lowest rates.
Visual Search (requires the install of Microsoft's Silverlight)
The visual search allows for a "new way to formulate and refine your search queries through imagery". This is an interesting concept so I invite you to check it out. Here's how it looks:
The features above are probably the biggest. There may be others out there I have yet to discover. Are there any "Bingers" out there who might have something to add? I appreciate the clean front page and features so I will check it out and possibly blog on it later.
Here's a cool website which allows you to see the results from both search engines. It's pretty cool http://www.bing-vs-google.com/.
PC World's article, Bing vs Google vs Yahoo: Feature Smackdown, took a look at each and the author prefers Google. Bing appears to be a good competitor from what I've seen.
Nice post. I have came across Bing but never really thought about trying it out. I went to the comparison website and it seems that one cool thing about Bing is it posts the little video icons within the results. I think that's pretty cool. Thanks for the post.
ReplyDeleteCool post,
ReplyDeleteI always thought that Bing is another imitating tool like Google or Yahoo, but it iseems that it has lots to offer. I am still not sure what the big difference is between all these search engines. Many of the items you mentioned are practiced by google and yahoo as well. Maybe the biggest difference is that you can view the site without you actaully visiting it.
I have used Bing and found certain aspects f it really cool. I haven't quite figured out why they advertise it as a decision engine, but most of the time I am doing research for one project or another. I am actually getting ready to purchase plane tickets so I think I may try Bing to search, it sounds like it will be much more useful than other ticket sites.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this post. I just learned more about Bing. As far as I know, Google try to keep up with Bing by implementing comparable features to its search engine. The question is what is better, being the first on market or offering it as the second on market, maybe with a better solution than Bing, to a wider target group!? We will see how things move on
ReplyDeleteDiane,
ReplyDeleteI like that bing vs. google site that you found. It looks like it passes your keyword onto google and bing then displays the pages with an iframe. Its a pretty simple concept but they have executed it well!
My experience with Bing is that is has greatly improved in comparison to Microsoft Live or whatever their search engine was before. The coolest feature to me is the image search. The search results expand as you scroll down so you never have to click next page like you do in Google. Sounds like a good implementation of Ajax to me!
I never looked into bing because i thought it was the same typical search engine. I love the fact how it will search the lowest price and give you cash back if you find it cheaper somewhere else. It will still be hard for the competition to overtake google. When I think about it, i never see a google commercial, but i have seen a few bling commercial good luck Microsoft.
ReplyDelete