Microsoft Bing Search Engine Goes Live

Microsoft’s new search engine has created quite buzz since its introduction a few days ago. Finally, the search engine is now live for everyone to test. But Microsoft seems to have it optimized for English speaking users from the United States and the UK who get more functionality than someone from non-english speaking countries.

Users from the United States get previews of the contents of each site by hovering the mouse cursor over a search result while users from unsupported countries do not get these previews. The previews can contain up to five links to other content of the site which is a very interesting feature as search engines usually limit the exposure to one or two links to a site on each page. Many aspects of Bing look like Google Search (But It's Not Google - BING). There are also sponsored advertisements on top of the search results pages and on the left and some content related images will be added where appropriate to the results.



Bing also categorizes search results appropriately. A search for let's say a city like New York will start with all results on the top and display categories like maps, weather, travel or attractions below each with a handful of search results. This is actually an interesting concept as it might aid inexperienced users in their search. Experienced users on the other hand will perform targeted searches to find the information they are looking for.

Bing will display the categories, related searches and the search history on the left. The image search of Bing displays image results on an infinite scrolling page with some nice features like an option to filter images by size, layout, color, style or people, and a virtual map that can be displayed for location based searches. It will for instance link pictures to locations on the map.

Bing's Video search makes it possible to play videos directly on the results page. This can be done by hovering the mouse over a video or by clicking on the play button that appears when hovering over the video. Videos can also be filtered by length, resolution, screen size or source. Bing seems to have improved over Windows Live, especially for popular search terms.