Filed under: Internet, Microsoft, Search
Bing goes live...or is that Live goes Bing?
In the wee hours of the morning, Microsoft flipped the switch and whether you like the name or not, Live Search has been bumped by Bing.
After finally getting a chance to test it out, I'm definitely more likely to use Bing than I was to use Live search. While it doesn't have the same tricks up its sleeves as Google (like unit conversions and exchange rates yes, yes it does - thanks, Bob!) it's still got plenty of nice touches. Search for a pro athlete, like the Red Wings' Jonathan Ericsson, and you'll get stats from his last performance, upcoming games, and more. Pretty slick.
You can also subscribe to any set of results via RSS and save search history in your Live account. The related searches, suggested refinements (like fights, biography, and quotes in the picture), and on-hover snippets help make researching a topic easier.
As Inquistir's Duncan Riley points out, things aren't all working the way we were promised in teaser videos. Example: hotel and shopping searches don't automatically present the tweaked results views - you'll need to go to bing.com/shopping or bing.com/travel to try them out.
Firefox users wanting to add Bing to you search box, here's your addon - contributed by our pal Long Zheng at IStartedSomething. Live Search addons will still work just fine, too.
If you've tested it out already, share your impressions in the comments!
After finally getting a chance to test it out, I'm definitely more likely to use Bing than I was to use Live search. While it doesn't have the same tricks up its sleeves as Google (
You can also subscribe to any set of results via RSS and save search history in your Live account. The related searches, suggested refinements (like fights, biography, and quotes in the picture), and on-hover snippets help make researching a topic easier.
As Inquistir's Duncan Riley points out, things aren't all working the way we were promised in teaser videos. Example: hotel and shopping searches don't automatically present the tweaked results views - you'll need to go to bing.com/shopping or bing.com/travel to try them out.
Firefox users wanting to add Bing to you search box, here's your addon - contributed by our pal Long Zheng at IStartedSomething. Live Search addons will still work just fine, too.
If you've tested it out already, share your impressions in the comments!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Todd said 8:55AM on 6-01-2009
Until I can pull apart Bing's crawler bots and compare their instruction set/behavior to Google's, my default position remains - Bing is a weak "me too" offering release solely to route people to purchasing Windows desktop OS via IE browser entanglements.
Prove to me that search results are not being weighted in favor of web pages written in .NET generated by IIS.
Prove to me that results from searches conducted in IE, running on un-pirated copies of Windows, are *not* different from searches conducted with FireFox on Linux, or Safari on a Mac.
Where is the Bing equivalent of this page?
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=15260
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216 said 9:11AM on 6-01-2009
You know, I would say its "Live goes Bing"
now where do i signup for a bada@bing.com email account?
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Bob Jones said 9:14AM on 6-01-2009
It does do currency conversion. Put GBP, EUR in and you'll get the rate. Put GBP HKD in.
It also does conversions of units, "1 metre in miles" returns "0.0006214 miles".
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Lee Mathews said 9:16AM on 6-01-2009
Apparently it's the Canadian dollar abbreviation Bing doesn't like.
Paul said 9:15AM on 6-01-2009
You know that Yahoo has had that feature with athletes for quite a while now, right?
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Lee Mathews said 9:17AM on 6-01-2009
Yahoo's doesn't do recent performance or the upcoming schedule inline, though.
webmaster.logicsofts said 11:00AM on 6-01-2009
Yes, I try it , nice one, perfect look, but still google is the best, hope in future it will be side by side with google
Thanks
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sitruc said 11:03AM on 6-01-2009
Would you care to be more specific?
kaushik810 said 10:35AM on 6-01-2009
Well, Bing is just a new interface to Live, the search engine is the same. I had never used Live before and I will never use Bing either, unless they improve the results. The initial hullabaloo is going to be over soon.
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Rob said 10:54AM on 6-01-2009
The whole interface is much, much nicer than google's; I've never used Live search, but if it was like this before, I probably would have used it instead of google had I known it existed. Information that bing gives is much more useful; a search for North Korea returns news results first, with additional logical searches listed below. The image search is also really cool; it dynamically loads more if you scroll down below what is currently displayed, and the map interface is also ahead of google, although the 3d thing doesn't have an Opera plugin. And to the first poster, why on earth would Microsoft want to give different results to people using different web browsers? That just makes no sense.
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sitruc said 11:06AM on 6-01-2009
The general web search has been updated some, but images and video have done those things for a while.
sitruc said 11:02AM on 6-01-2009
As I said in the last Bing/Live post, several updates were made to Live last Tuesday and Live began directing to bing this morning. A few things have been ironed out since the change to bing.
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Sanskrit said 12:01PM on 6-01-2009
Am I the only one who liked Kumo as a name better than Bing?
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Crazy Serb said 12:07PM on 6-01-2009
Well, let's see...
Google has provided simple and to the point search for years now.
And I love Google for it.
But, when I need details and those details delivered instantly without me needing to reload the pages and move on to next page and next page and on and on (yes, I'm talking about image search), I'm gonna turn to someone who provides me all I need on a single page.
And so far, after playing with Bing for 5 minutes, I can tell it's far more superior (in terms of delivering content *I need* and the way *I need* it fast).
Image search - filtering process works on the page, instantly. Ability to resize the result view (from small thumbs to large thumbs with details). Most significantly - the scrolling just loads more images... so there's no need for clicking "next page" ever again!
Maps - bird's view. End of story. Sure as hell beats the aerial/satellite image view.
Travel - ability to filter out the results right on the page, again, dynamically, without having to go to a ton of other sites looking for that information (as it DOES query all the cheapest results from all over the place)...
And so on, and so on...
Man, might be time to change my homepage to bing instead of google, as it's got everything that google has and then adds some sweet *bing* to it.
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sitruc said 1:55PM on 6-01-2009
Considering many of those features have been part of Live for a while I think this relaunch and rebranding is doing exactly what Microsoft intended. I'm weird so I try stuff every now and then just to see if I still don't like it(as of today I still hate regular Fanta). When I began using different searches again a few months ago, I was reminded of how stagnant Google has been and that they hadn't made a significant interface or presentation update. I also realized that they were in fact behind several searches in many categories. Every other browser I use had Live or Google as the default(and a few others a click away) as a result. I even had Live as the default search for Chrome on one computer.
ryaninc said 12:50PM on 6-01-2009
I was at work this morning minding my own business, when I suddenly heard one of my coworkers say, "What the hell is up with MSN today?" She has hotmail and always uses MSN for searches...which is now apparently forwarding to Bing.
She said that everything she was searching for in Bing was leading to something different than MSN. So...there's one negative review from an ordinary citizen. :-)
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Demodave said 1:11PM on 6-01-2009
So far, I like it. Is there a way to change the default number of results from 10 to 100...like in Google?
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sitruc said 1:46PM on 6-01-2009
Click on Extras at the top right and then click on preferences
Quikboy said 2:46AM on 6-02-2009
@Ectaco: Seems to work fine for me in IE8. I didn't notice any rendering issue, and it didn't show any Compatibility View icon when I use it.
Ectaco said 3:17PM on 6-01-2009
I find the Bing experience pretty similar to that of Google. It has some nice touches and small features, but not enough to make it really stand out, and they make it feel a bit cluttered. But, then again, Google has that big advantage of habbit. I've added Bing as search engine, but I'll probably not use it very much.
Curiously enough, though, the page didn't render well in IE8, whereas Opera rendered it perfectly. Is that just me, or did MS screw up?
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