A couple of days ago, I decided to do a search for The Sims 3 to find out if it had been released yet (it hadn’t as its release date was June 2). I sometimes like to alternate search engines from Yahoo, to Google, to Live Search. So, I decided to type in live.com and all of a sudden I was at bing.com. After having a small “WTF” moment, I decided to type live.com again, only to discover that the same phenomenon happened a second time. I was being redirected to this thing called Bing.
A quick search in Bing revealed that Microsoft re-branded Live.com into Bing in a new attempt to crack the search market share that is currently being dominated by Google and its scrappy rival Yahoo. A quick search reveals that as of February 2009, Google had a whopping 72% of all U.S. searches, followed by 17% for Yahoo, about 6% for Live Search, 4% for Ask.com, and the remaining 1% for other search engines like cuil.com. Microsoft has been trying desperately for many years now to improve its search position, and took a step toward that by (somewhat) overhauling its offerings.
My first impressions were that this was just Live.com rebranded as Bing.com with a different background image per day. Then, as I used it a little more, I started to realize that the makeover was far more substantiative than that. Bing tries to bring you *everything* that could possibly be relevant to your search on one page. Doing a search for the Los Angeles Dodgers, for example, will bring you all the standard pages related to the Dodgers, plus the results of the past three games and the next three games that are scheduled. You’ll get their record, their position on the National League, current streak, and the W-L of their previous ten games. In addition, you’ll get the top few results from related searches for “Dodgers merchandise”, “rumors”, “schedule”, “wallpaper”, “history”, and “images”. Phew! And the most amazing part is that if you take a look at the real search page, you’ll realize that I didn’t list everything.
That, my friends, is one heck of an incredible amount of information packed into one results page. A search on Google gives you less than half of that information. Now, many sites have done gimmicks much similar to this, but Microsoft has actually achieved this quite elegantly. The page doesn’t feel too crowded and the results feel impressively relevant.
Bing honestly feels a little like Google on steroids, which I feel will lead to either a love it or hate it response. Some people will love the barrage of relevant results whilst others will still identify with the comparatively minimalist approach of Google. I feel that Bing is the first serious attempt by Microsoft to compete with Google so we’ll see how it plays out in the long run. I’m certainly liking the odds so far.
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Tags: Background Image, Couple Of Days, First Impressions, Google, Google Search, Los Angeles Dodgers, Market Share, Offerings, Other Search Engines, Phenomenon, Phew, Release Date, Rival Yahoo, Search Market, Search Position, Second Time, Sims, Three Games, Wallpaper History, Yahoo Search
