Microsoft unveiled its new search engine called Bing ( www.bing.com) recently in a bid to muscle its way into the Google-dominated world of search.
According to the Microsoft’s research, the results for 50 per cent of the queries do not satisfy users, who end up abandoning or refining their search effort.
In an attempt to make the user’s life simpler, Bing “has been designed to meet the needs of today’s searchers who are using search for purposes beyond ten blue links on a page.The features highlighted have two aims — making search easier and more organised.
For instance, the autosuggest feature that guesses what you are trying to type, or the ‘document preview’ which lets you hover over the search result and see a preview of the site’s content, are features that make the searching process simpler.
Instant answers :
The ‘Best Match’ is an attempt to reduce the number of clicks, by trying to provide the relevant information for your query up front. In case of direct queries, the ‘instant answers’ feature does what its name indicates — say, you are searching for a flight number, the recent flight information will be displayed up front.
‘Quick Tabs’ is a feature that helps make search more organised.
The video search also provides a preview if you hover over a particular result. And instead of navigating from one page to another all results are offered in an ‘infinitely’ scrolling page.
Bing also offers image, news and map-based search.
Helping travellers :
It has also identified shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research as areas of particular focus. Bing Travel, which has already been launched, offers tools and and features to help travellers make ‘more informed decisions.’ In the Indian context, though it comes up with flight and hotel information relating to the country, the prices are listed in dollars, which seems to indicate that it is not exactly tuned to the local market as of now.
Beta version : Bing now is in its Beta version.
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