Bing Bada Bing – Just Another Search Engine ?

Microsoft is back with a Bing

For what seems like an eternity, Google has been ingrained in my browsing life as the natural response to all of my searching stimuli. Never has it even come across my mind that I would need anything else to hunt a piece of information down. And I guess this is the case with everyone else. The fact that the search giant’s name is used more as a verb than a noun in this era shows that they truly have swept clear the playing field with such deftness that ‘Google’ and ‘search’ have long become synonymous to each other. I doubt that any other product out there can come close to claim such an intimate relationship with the word ‘search’. But then the question that comes to mind is: ‘Has Google attained perfection?’. Can our hearts make space for anything else now? Can we put down ‘Google’ as a part of the universal equation of life? Well, maybe not.

One slow afternoon in my limbo period between graduate studies and a job, a friend of mine sent me an e-mail telling me how Microsoft has revamped their search campaign and released their latest brainchild called ‘Bing’. My first reaction, as I’m sure was the reaction of many other people who watch the TV series ‘Friends’, was ‘Bing? That reminds me of Chandler Bing. What a strange name.’ Two weeks later, I don’t think it sounds that horrible though. It’s actually kinda catchy.

Anyways, after reading the e-mail I kind of felt sympathetic towards Microsoft. They had been trying so hard to displace Google’s search market with no avail. Numerous updates to Live Search went unnoticed while Google dominated the arena with a whopping 70% share of the market pie. They even chased Yahoo! to buy them out in an effort to claim the 17% of the market that they had but that pursuit too went down the drain. A fresh start seemed to make sense for them. So, yea, I clicked on the link.

From the first glance, I didn’t see anything special at all. It was pretty much Live Search with a new name. The intro page talked about it being a ‘decision engine’ of some sorts and I was like ‘whatever that means’. I entered some weird search term hoping that Bing would pull out a rabbit from a hat while displaying the search results but I was disappointed again. Nothing out of the ordinary. Sigh. Its just another search engine. Close tab.

A few days later I was playing around with Google Analytics and musing over the horrible statistics of one of my blogs. During the search, I found a link talking about how Bing had started sending traffic to sites with GA plugged in and that Google posted a work around to include Bing as a traffic source in the GA reports. I was curious. Did I miss something? I thought I could spare a few minutes so intrigued, I opened up Bing again and this time started scrutinizing the engine. And boy, did I make some interesting discoveries.

First, I decided to take the ‘Discover Bing’ tour because I wanted to let Microsoft to show me exactly what made it a ‘decision engine’ and not a typical search application. I opened up Google in a parallel tab and thought I’d run a contest. Overall, I found Bing and Google coming up with great result sets but Bing at times had a little more oomph by offering more ‘action-oriented links’. What do I mean by this? Here are some insights:

1. For example, do you want to check whether your friend’s flight is on time? Typically, you would Google up an air traffic tracking site (like flightstats.com) to find that information out. Bing allows you to just type in the flight number and walah – real time status on the search results.

Now, I’ve rarely every used FareCast and MSN Travel to make travel decisions and I’m guessing Bing simply inherits the terrific travel module from those sites. So, want to book a flight? Well, go to bing.com/travel and it pretty much does everything that other fare-hunting websites like Kayak.com would do by fetching the best fares that match your criteria. The 7 day price predictor was slick too as it gave you a crucial inkling (with some confidence) on whether you should nab the ticket now or wait for a bit to let them slide. So, in other words, Bing sort of centralizes your travel functions.

2. The same day I was sitting with my parents and my mom wanted to know about whether some specific food items had cholesterol or not. I Googled the information and it showed a web result that led me to a nutritional site. I ‘Binged’ it up and it actually included the cholesterol content (from USDA) in the search results.

3. Bing also inherits the cashback functions that Live Search had, making it attractive for shopping as well. Search for a camera model and it will include a mini-profile of the product including a picture, a recommended price and ‘ease of use’ and ‘affordability’ evaluations. Click on the summary link and it will list all the outlets that Microsoft has cashback offers with and links to buying them there and then. Although this feature isn’t robust enough to include a wide variety of products, I still feel that it expedited my objective to get the best deal along with a cashback incentive. And besides, it’s still Beta

4. What about Maps? Enter an address in Bing and it will come up with a map of the place. But Google does it better as it will also throw in a ‘start’ bar where you can type the source destination from where you want to get to that place. However, with Bing you can instantly get real time traffic conditions (only for the US though!) which adds a bit more ‘wisdom’ in planning your escapades to the new coffee shop in town.

5. I loved the conversion and mathematics engine that Bing uses. Type in a quadratic (I tried: a^2 + a + 100 = 12) equation in Google and it will spit out a bunch of web sites. Do that in Bing and it will solve for ‘a’! Of course, Wolfram Alpha goes one up on that and gives you graphs to boot.

6. Video Search in Bing seems more “organized”. For example, there is a section that deals with TV episodes on Hulu (which TV addicts will find convenient) and then other sections with results grouped by criteria like ‘most popular’, ‘most recent’ etc. Google Videos just shows you what’s popular right now on its home page. At least that’s what happened when I opened it up.

7. The image search of Bing with infinity pages (also in Live Search) beats the Google experience in my view. Scrolling down is faster than flipping a page.

8. Bing includes a useful search history and has the capability to remember you making it easier to find that site you wanted to visit but realized that the magic keywords that brought it forth had slipped your mind. 

Of course this analysis isn’t comprehensive but in short my conclusion was that Bing effectively shortened the distance between one’s search entry and intended action for a variety of commonly used domains like travel, shopping, health etc. Now I know what it means by a ‘decision engine’

Also, Bing has introduced its own content ranking system called xRank (I wonder if LiveSearch already used this!) which is seemingly aligned to challenge Google’s PageRank which needless to say is the core essence of Google’s search app. I don’t know about the technical details but I love the fact that Bing offers you a convenient way to check out most frequently searched terms, search volumes and other information based on the xRank factor. Now, whether xRank is technically superior (or even different!) from PageRank is something I’m still interested to find out.

Phew. After a long trial run of Bing, I realized that Bing isn’t really ‘another search engine’. Bing seems to have these little tricks in the bag that makes some of your commonplace operations quicker and easier. Microsoft hasn’t focused on throwing in too much eye candy like SearchMe and Cuil did which is a good thing as spirited searchers are more concerned about getting their information-thirst quenched, not whether they get to see an army of pages lined up in flash-coated glass vessels.

Having said all this, to say that Google has serious competition is still like jumping to conclusions. Sure, MSFT has done a good job but getting the word out, convincing people to leave their ‘MSFT is evil’ beliefs and give Bing a chance will require some major marketing effort , rhetoric and personalized love. So, will Bing challenge Google in the upcoming years? I don’t know. I might ‘bing’ the question up in a few years though.