Bada BING, fagedaboutit to old-style searches, try this new “decision” support search solution from Microsoft

Microsoft announced this new search service at the D7 conference last week and although it wasn’t scheduled to go “live” until June 3rd, it’s actually up and running today.  So check it out at http://www.bing.com/

Also, check out this page for lots more info on BING: Bing info on Microsoft PressPass site (includes links to press releases and reviewers’ guides and fact sheets)

If any of you had heard about our project code-named Kumo, this is basically the release version of that.  One of the most interesting things here is that Microsoft is not looking to launch just another search engine, but rather a “decision engine” that provides more than just a list of web pages that you have to sort thru many times to find what you’re really looking for.  In fact, research shows that a significant number of people actually use web search to find answers to questions or to get specific information, not just look for web pages that might have related info.  This research also showed that it took on average 3-4 sequential searches to finally get to the information they were looking for.  This is the limitation of current search engines that we are looking to address.  For sure, BING will still return Web results, but it also has built-in helper tools for searches that go beyond just finding Web pages, particularly when it comes to travel, shopping, health, and local info. 

The big deal here is that BING will increase the chances that you’ll get the answer you need right on the results page, without the need to click to another site, which, in the old search paradigm still may not even have what you're looking for.  One the key new features that facilitate this goal is the "quick-page preview," which displays text from pages in the results when you hover the mouse over the right side of a result's entry. I think this is going to be a killer feature, I’ve seen others already write that it's one of those "why wasn't that always there?" features that you quickly become dependent on.  But wait, as they say, there’s more - Bing has other features to help you get the answers you want directly on its results page such as “deep links” (e.g. you can search inside large sites without having to click into it, like track a package using a text box right in the results of searches on UPS or FedEx).  And there’s Quick Previews (look for the orange diamonds to the right when you hover over the search result descriptive text).   There’s also a feature called “Best Match” designed to make the “best” result stand out from the others and highlight the most potentially useful info.  And, also Instant Answers (type NWA 1420 or Samsung and see what you get right off).   Plus, Bing groups top search results into categories known as Web Groups. For more of the features coming to you in Bing, check out the reviewers guide in the PressPass link above.

One of the things you’ll notice right away that set it apart is the sidebar on the left that you could also call a “nav bar”.  Starting with the first search page, the consistency of this new interface begins: The left sidebar is always there to offer options, categories, and filters to fine-tune your search results.  Thus, it lets you quickly get at relevant subsets of the topic you searched for.  The results are also localized, but know that you first have to tell it your location, which is one of the initial settings you can configure.  And, btw, the home page itself is also much more interesting than the plain white Google or Ask.com (note: if you click on the arrows at the bottom right, you can cycle thru previous daily home pages).  For instance, here’s today’s home page, note the informational “hotspots”:

Here’s a couple of screen shots of searches…

Well, I just wanted to let you know about this and encourage you to go take a look at http://www.bing.com/