Software giant’s product is a challenge to Google’s popular search engine
Gillian Shaw
Sun
Bing is causing a buzz as software giant Microsoft takes on the Google Goliath with a new decision search engine that promises to make online searches faster and more intuitive.
The announcement Thursday came not long after Google unveiled its own new e-mail and collaboration initiative “Google Wave” which takes a new approach to online communications.
Bing, currently in preview mode, will launch to the public in Canada and the U.S. on June 3, and will roll out in other countries around the globe during the next 12 to 18 months.
“We have focused on listening to consumers and going through and really trying to understand what consumers are doing online,” said Stacey Jarvis, search lead for Microsoft Canada. “Over the past 12 years, search hasn’t evolved to meet consumer needs.”
Jarvis said as the Internet has expanded and there are increased multi-media offerings with everything from images to audio and video, consumers are finding their searches are becoming less successful.
“Consumers aren’t necessarily satisfied with their search results,” she said. “Only one in four queries currently delivers a successful result” — defined as finding what you want on the first page of the search results.
Jarvis said search queries are becoming more decision-oriented as consumers go online for everything from buying choices to health research. Jarvis said 42 per cent of all searches require some refinement.
Jarvis said that Bing is designed to anticipate user intent, a feature that allows surfers to zoom in more efficiently on the information they are seeking. Canadians are among the search gurus of the world — coming second only to Finland with an average of 124 searches per month per user.
Bing has a number of tools from autosuggest, which suggests similar or related terms to the one you are searching, best match to cut the number of click-throughs to find the subsection of a website you need — such as customer service numbers — and document preview that lets a user hover over a search result to preview the site’s content.
I tried Bing s preview, typing in “Vancouver“.
• On the left-hand side, an explore pane offers filtered results. In this case: weather, airport, hotels, map, real estate, and images.
• The search results themselves are grouped under those headings on the page, and then a few general entries that included such links as a Wikipedia listing, the City of Vancouver‘s website, Tourism Vancouver, and Discover Vancouver.
• There are still sponsored ads on the search site, but Jarvis said the search results are based on query intent and are not ads.
• For related searches, a “Vancouver” Bing search turned up Craigslist-Vancouver, The Vancouver Sun, The Province, Vancouver BC, Vancouver Giants, and Vancouver Canada.
There is also a session history feature which tracks your searches so you can return to those results without having to type in a new query.
Google had its own announcement in San Francisco this week, where it previewed Google Wave — which is being made available to a small number of developers before it is launched to the public.
Wave will let multiple users exchange real-time dialogue, photos, videos, maps, documents and other information forms within a single, shared space — a wave — with contributors able to add replies, edit the wave, or see what others are typing.
As for Bing, Google said it welcomes the competition.
“We welcome competition that helps deliver useful information to users and expands user choice,” Google Canada spokeswoman Tamara Micner said in an e-mail. “Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space. It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that.”
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