Microsoft’s launched Bing a few weeks ago. As everyone is well aware, Bing (formerly MSN Search, Live Search, Live.com, Kumo?, etc.) is M’s latest attempt to catch up with Google. After “Bing-ing” for a while I found the most intriguing aspect to be the high resolution pictures – they’re darn cool. Anyway, it’s still early and I can’t say I’ve found a reason to change my primary search engine from Google. That said Microsoft has taken a step forward. Not quite the giant leap ahead but progress.
You’re encouraged to explore Bing. Spend some time on it and use it for a week. When searching images I found the additional filters on the left easy to use and an improvement over Google’s image search features. On the other hand the videos that start playing on mouse over are somewhat annoying. I understand the idea and the technology is cool but I’m not sure I like it. Just a personal thing.
PCC ads show a maximum of 11 with the top 2 positions repeated at the bottom of the page. Just above the bottom page PPC ads is a “8-pack” of local search listings. Occasionally the placement changed to the top just below the PPC ads with number of listings changing. It’ll be interesting to watch how Microsoft plays with the SERPs. Though their biggest issue is lack of traffic I expect them to be more aggressive in their experimentation of paid search results.
Search results were impressively on target. There were few instances of off target results (i.e. forum threads). Suggestion to the engines, how about personalized filtering? Please don’t ever index YouTube comments. There should be a requirement that cuts down all the garbage posting. Then again when you’re 15 years old what else are you going do?