bing – oh, new search engine in town
Posted by Jacque on June 4th, 2009
It’s everywhere now — Microsoft’s recently announced replacement for Live Search, called bing, to keep things short and simple. See what a search for “bing” on bing looks like to the right.
Microsoft says bing is a “search engine that finds and organizes the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.” It leads you to:
- Images
- Videos
- Shopping
- News
- Maps
- Travel
You can find out more about bing from Microsoft here. They claim bing overcomes current search engine deficiencies in 3 major areas by:
- Delivering great search results and one-click access to relevant information
- Creating a more organized search experience
- Simplifying tasks and providing tools that enable insight about key decisions
Microsoft also “found that 66 percent of consumers are more focused on using the Internet to get things done, rather than to simply find information. So with bing they created more than an Internet search engine. “Instead, we created what is essentially an Internet decision engine that will help you navigate through the rampant excess of information and find the shortest distance to an informed decision.”
Get an outsider’s view of of the product from the Boston Globe.
They say that Microsoft has made serious improvements over Live Search, although not enough to catch up with Google. “But the new product is good enough to make the Google-Microsoft contest truly interesting.”
And just open today - Bing Travel, which TechCrunch notes is one of the verticals Microsoft is focusing much of its attention on with the new “decision engine” as it sets out to take market share from Google and Yahoo Search. Bing Travel combines a lot of the airfare and hotel reservation tools from Microsoft’s 2008 acquisition of Farecast with news and other editorial content from MSN Travel.
Customers will be able to take advantage of tools and features like Price Predictor (designed to forecast how airfare prices are going to evolve), Rate Indicator (set up to highlight the best hotel deals), but also Travel Deals, Comparison Flight & Hotel Search, and Fare Alerts.
As shown in the image to the left, you can easily add bing to your list of search engines to select when using Firefox.
