Bing - Yet another New Kid on the Block?
Yes, hot on the heels of Ask's recent attempts to regain share of the market, we have another of the old stalwarts trying to win back some of the hotly contested 'people who don't use Google' crowd, leaving only Yahoo to pull something out of their hat now. In yet another new branding exercise (We've now been MSN Search, and Windows Live Search), Microsoft have abandoned their traditional names to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon with a nondescriptly named site, Bing.
Whilst it's still in early stages, as Search Engine Optimisation is key in our minds when designing sites, we thought it worth checking out whether it could be a potentially strong competitor in what is already a difficult market, or just another brand that'll sink without trace. The first thing, and the biggest is it's traditional searching. And first impressions? Well... there's nothing really new. The search results are very much in the style of Google, with the only additions currently being an 'alternative searches' list down the left, and a small hover over preview of the site's text content without having to open the site. It will be interesting to see how this works going forward with some of the Black Hat Optimised sites out there (those stuffed with nothing more than keyword keyword keyword keyword), as if people do use such a feature they should in theory get an uninteresting preview and never go to the site, but I doubt this will be a killer feature for the site.
The image search on the other hand is a little more original, though I'd not be surprised if Google already have a similar layout lined up to battle back any competition. As well as some quite advanced filtering options immediately available (such as colour, layout, photograph), the traditional Page 1, Page 2 style of results has gone. Instead Bing features a single page, which keeps growing as you scroll down. It is a bit un-nerving at first, but could have some interesting impact on how people find rarer images. After all, at the moment with Google Search, most images past about page 3 or 4 get missed, whilst with this new layout jumping straight to later results is made much simpler.
Overall though, it's hard to get past the fact there's little revolution on this new site. The main search only has a few minor new features, whilst Shopping, Video, News and Maps seem to be more of the same (or just linking out to a third party site). It'll be interesting to see whether the memorable 'Bing' brand helps brings in more interest than 'Windows Live Search' is currently, but unless there's some more big features to come along very soon this author can't see it making any huge waves in the search engine market.
Posted By: Terence
04 June 2009