Microsoft, in Search of an Edge

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Images. You can choose "Images" from the menu, much like with Google, but here again Bing does one better, showing you hundreds of thumbnails on a single huge page, rather than making you jump from one page with 20 photos to another. Hover over any thumbnail and you pull up info about it—what Web site it comes from, how big the photo is, and so forth. Again, this isn't going to win Microsoft a Nobel Prize or anything, but it's a really cool feature and saves you a lot of time. Bing also lets you get funky with the way photos are laid out on the page, customizing the layout to put more pictures per row, and so on.

Left-handcolumn. Type in a keyword and you not only get the regular list of results in blue down the middle of the page, but you also get a column on the left that shows you "Related Searches" that you might find useful. If you're looking at a celebrity like Sacha Baron Cohen, you get links to his fan club, quotes from him, and interviews with him. All this makes it easy to perform a search that goes "sideways"—i.e., leaping from one related thing to another—rather than just moving straight ahead linearly.

Search history. At the bottom of that left-hand column is a list of your recent searches on Bing, which makes it very easy to go back to something you were looking at before. This comes in handy when you're doing one of those sideways searches, roaming around here and there, because it lets you retrace your steps and go back to where you began.

Bottom line: Bing is nice. Really nice. Will it kill Google? Nah. Most of us, to be honest, are creatures of habit. And we're all in the habit of using Google, so much so that the company's name has become a verb. Quitting Google is like quitting smoking. It can be done, but I think it would involve rewiring part of your brain. It's especially tough for those of us who now rely heavily on other Google programs, like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, and YouTube. Lately I've begun to realize how completely Google has grown up around my online existence, like some kind of creeping kudzu. I don't mean this in a bad way. Google makes some great products, so great, in fact, that you can't help using them.

At the same time, will Bing put pressure on Google to add features to its search engine instead of resting on its laurels? Definitely. In fact, I'm sure that right now, hidden away in the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., a bunch of programmers are toiling away to imitate (and hopefully, improve upon) the innovations that Microsoft has introduced. That kind of competition is a good thing for all of us.

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Posted By: Aditya Mookerjee @ 07/21/2009 6:45:43 AM

The reason why I use Google, is because it is very simple and convenient to use. People usually know what they are looking for, when they use a search engine, perhaps, they know more than me, when I use a search engine. So, the most convenient layout for a search engine, is what people look for. I feel, that Chrome, the web browser, complements the virtues of the Google search engine admirably. I use Chrome, because I feel it is the best for Google.
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Posted By: brenhegarty @ 07/14/2009 11:59:59 AM

According to Toolheads logic, if I wanted to do a search on the former presidents Bush I should make sure to include their names or title in the search phrase as there are many more bushes in areas relating to horticulture etc than politics.
I am sorry but I would expect at least some hits on the presidents as well as garden plants. He seems to be confusing quantity with quality.

As to his comment on searching for McDonald I would expect more hits on the fast food business rather than an obscure baseball player. The fast food chain is world wide and may be listed in connection with results relating to the environment, business, nutrition etc whereas most non Americans have no knowledge or interest in baseballl. I would expect the results to reflect this. I had no problem with Bing listing results on small town America but I would have expected some reference in the first 10 pages of results to a major figure of the second world war.
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Posted By: dantalion @ 07/14/2009 6:31:51 AM

I think the logic of toolhead's criticism is more problematic than the choice of search words used by brenhegarty... To put it bluntly toolhead, the fact that Google responded correctly to the non-specific search terms while Bing did not is the reason that Google has dominated the search market for the past eight years. It great that you can sit smug and offer us your infinite wisdom about the lack of intelligence of human beings, but I would like to see how smart you would be if you decided to Google a subject you genouinely had no clue about. What search terms would you pick then? How would you know if these search terms were the most appropriate ones (remember, your intelligence cannot help you here because you are in the dark)? Google has proven itself as probably the most successful Artificial Intelligence project in history precisely because it can return relevant results based on vague searches. This is exactly the way Google and Bing should be compared. Everything else mentioned in this article is gimmicks, which are not the point of search. But I guess for truly intelligent people like toolhead, gimmicks are more important.