I’m taking Bing for a spin. I’ve changed my default search engine to Bing, and am going to give a try. I am not particularly interested to see if it has  better ranking than Google. It probably won’t matter but for a few cases anyway.

What I am more interested in are the various navigational and finding aids that have been incorporated into the search engine’s interface. So far, I’ve seen the following interesting aspects:

• Search history is probably the most useful interface feature, particularly the “see all” view that shows the timeline of recent queries and the documents selected from them. It also accrues documents for the same query,  but does not indicate the rank of the document in that list, and does not indicate whether the same document was retrieved by multiple queries. This is a positive step toward managing personal search sessions, but one they need to work on some more.
• Related searches seem like a good way of approximating polysemy & suggesting effective refinements. Unfortunately, query-based similarity may not show enough diversity to be useful in some cases. The query ” IBM” generates several suggested queries, all containing IBM. In some contexts, however, Apple or Lenovo may be related searches to IBM, as might Microsoft. On the other hand, the search “health” produces suggestions that include “Medical symptoms,” “medical,” and several other queries with the word “health” in them.
• Mouse-over preview a potentially-useful way of getting previews of link destination. This type of interaction was also present on the old health.live.com site, which unfortunately has disappeared. Some of the features appear to be sprinkled into Bing, but I think it was useful to have a separate, more focused, search portal for health issues.
• Searching for “bing” identifies Google, Yahoo!, MySpace and YouTube (not Ask) as similar. Interestingly, clicking on those, takes you to the bing hit for that site, not to the site itself. It also provides a way to search the web using the selected engine (e.g., Google, Yahoo, AOL, Twitter, etc.) directly from within the bing page.  But searching for LinkedIn gives a summary without search options, and suggests Plaxo as one of the similar sites. Plaxo does offer a search box, but not “similar to this” links. Odd.
• Bing also seems to offer re-skinned summaries of Wikipedia articles on corporations. It seems mildly clever, but not terribly useful.
• I like the “cover page” images with the little factoids.
• Image search has an interesting feature of filtering by some simple metadata (including people’s faces), and usefully saves the list of images returned by the search in a left side bar when displaying a selected image. Unforunately, the search “Paris” yielded a fair number of Hiltons among the Eiffels, and the metadata was not up to the task of sorting among them. I think that reusing the suggested queries from the web view in the image view would make sense.

One problem with these enhancements is that as things stand, its not clear when the different aids such as facets and nested links or other interface widgetry (such as the embedded search boxes for other search sites) will pop up, and this uncertainty is not a good thing.

Overall, I think the site is an interesting step away from the Google rut. One aspect they need to pay attention to, however, is predictability. I hope they keep taking further steps to create a richer, more nuanced search experience.

Share on: