MACAW research gave Wolfram Alpha a test drive earlier this year. This time we take a look at Bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine, which was launched worldwide in the beginning of June. Bing is promoted as a Decision Engine, which implies it is more than just a search engine.
To quote Microsoft, “Bing takes a new approach to helping customers use search to make better decisions, focusing initially on four key user tasks and related areas: making a purchase, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.”
In addition to these specialized task-oriented features, Bing is also a general purpose search engine. As international business consultants, we do travel a bit, however we are more often performing searches as part of research projects. Thus we will limit our testing of Bing to general purpose searches where Google to this day reigns supreme.
If we’re going to be using Bing, it needs to perform as well as – or better – than Google. Our first test query “macaw research” run on both engines gave us slightly different results. Our website, www.macawresearch.com, is the top pick on both engines, and they both return the Wikipedia entry on Macaw, as well as the Tambopata Macaw Research project on the first search result page. Google returns links both to the MACAW Card Bulletin, published by us, and to our Twitter profile. Bing doesn’t bring back anything else related to our company on the first search result page, so it is a better option if your primary interest is bird research links. Our second query, “EU population”, also returns some shared results, including Wikipedia entries and links to optimumpopulation.org, but then there are some differences. Google returns what we would say is the most relevant for a market researcher – a link to Eurostat, the EU central statistics agency. After a bit more testing, in general, it seems like you get a different mix of results with Google and Bing, and the relevancy is fairly high for both engines, with a slightly higher utility in favor of Google for our test queries.
However, Bing has some nice features. For instance you can hover over a link and Bing will retrieve some basic information from the site the link leads to, allowing you a preview. Using this feature can be faster than clicking and then going back if the page doesn’t give you what you were looking for, according to Microsoft something that occurs in 24% of cases with clicks on search result links.
Bing also uses what Microsoft terms an Explore Panel, which contains Related Searches and Quick Tabs. The former is suggested other search strings related to your current search, whereas tabs are somewhat more sophisticated with dynamic categories that depend on the search. Searches for a certain city name yield Quick Tabs for tours, travel and images; searches for a car model generate categories on reviews, accessories and videos.
So, what’s the verdict? We’ll have to use Bing a bit more before we can conclude on anything, but it definitely looks promising. Search results tend to overlap with Google, but there are some differences, which suggest it can be worthwhile to do a search on both engines in some cases. With regards to features, Microsoft is on to something, particularly with preview, however it will probably not be long before Google or someone else copies it. All in all, we are pleasantly surprised.
