Porkchop Technology Review's

Bing Search Engine Front Page

Ever since Yahoo decided not to sell to Microsoft, to compete with Google, Microsoft has designed its own, and improved search engine, a very big improvement from there live search engine they had before.  I remember seeing commercials on TV regarding Bing, but did not really know what they were, until I started seeing an increasing amount of hits coming from bing.com, which made me take a look at the site, and I realised this was the new search engine from Microsoft.  I have to say I like it a lot, I like how it loads quickly, the searches are quick and I like how you can see when you over a link on the right hand side there is a small little line on the right hand side, if you hover it, it gives you a small snippet from the page and links in the page, which makes you not have to click on the link, you can read a small preview of the page right from the search, which will save a lot of time.  Another thing I like about Bing is when you search a image, you hover it and it gets a little bit bigger, and when you click on the image on the left hand side there is a frame with the other images, which makes it great since you don’t have to hit your back button like in Google image search. 

There video search has to be the best out, when you search for a video, when you put your mouse onto a video, it plays the video right there, without actually having to click on the video and loading the page, which saves time, and if you like the video and want to see it full screen, you would click the link.  The news search is pretty basic, nothing new added, same as google pretty much.  The map search is pretty basic, not as good as Google, the map in Bing looks like your average map from a map book, it allows you to zoom in to streets and it’s accurate, but Google map’s is the best since you can actually see the location in detail.  They have a feature under more, which is called Xrank which is suppose to see who and what every one’s searching for most, which most search engines are missing, its impossible to find out which key terms are being searched the most in any search engine.  The main search engine page looks good, with the imaged background and option to search locally in your country.   A new feature is that when you search something in the search, images appear on the bottom of the page, so it’s doing a dual search, for both text content and images.

The only con’s I see with Bing is that they are late on the search engine market, coming out in 2009, and also the problem I see with all the preview functions they added, such as video’s and websites, that many people who would probably get the hit on there site, will probably not because of all the previews it has, for example when you click on a video, in the video search, it brings you to a bigger screen for the video, on Bing, which would probably make people not actually like the video and go to the original content and see the website of the person who created the video.  The pro’s to this of course, is that it saves time from loading other peoples page’s and also that it will be good for people who are still on slow Internet connections, since this will reduce loading times of videos and sites.

I have to say that bing.com is an awesome search engine, and much needed alternative to Google search, even though I really like Google search and have been using it for years Google has been a little carried away with there Google adword advertising that ruins there search engine results, which means that say you are trying to get some good content, written by someone who isn’t spending a lot of money, and the big company, who pays for there listing to be at the top, will be there regardless of content, because that company is paying so and so much to always be at the top of the search results.  I also think that Yahoo will now become extinct for search, since Bing.com beats yahoo in anyway possible, and Google hasn’t had to worry about Yahoo at all, only when Microsoft was interested in buying them. So go on and give bing.com a try, I think you will like it, and maybe even replace your homepage from google.com to bing.com!