Thoughts:

Bing shopping is much better than Froogle ever was. They are pushing the "cash back" program pretty hard, and it will probably gain some traction.

Bing Video really doesn't show much YouTube content. That gives a bunch different search results, which is kinda nice. The video preview is rather helpful. Bing airfare shopping is now going to be my first stop for airfare shopping. Really, really nice. Bing is now competing with Orbitz, Priceline, Kayak, and doing a great job at it.

Bing image search is okay. Image search sucks in general, but it's nice to have a third source for image searches (flikr being the other).

Bing maps are useable. Google maps is the clear winner.

Had anybody else aside from Microsoft just launched this product, it would have been nothing short of amazing. People here would be very excited. Google will still be #1, but at least now they have a serious competitor.

Microsoft just learned a whole bunch about making data centers and making server operating systems run in large clusters. That's going to influence their server OS game in a big way for the better.

Cashback launched about a year ago, and has been integrated into the product search for months.

Infinite scroll on images is nice too, but that's been there as long as I can remember.

Farecast (the airfare search engine) was acquired by Microsoft a while back, and was part of Live.

If anyone has anything that shows it more thoroughly I'd like to see it?

1. Super fast.

2. Image search is far superior to Google's.

3. Travel search is great. Try "deals to hawaii".

4. I like the name. Easy to remember and only 4 letters.

5. Weather searches work great.

6. I like the related searches and search history on the left.

7. I like the wikipedia integration.

1. Similar quality of results.

2. Superior image search. Actually, I think Google's image search is a result of them being on top for so long, it's been the same for years with little improvement. I mean, just look at Bing's.

3. Better video search. I love the hover-preview feature. I can see Google implementing it next year after some other mainstream sites implement it and it's no longer a "Bing thing."

4. Slightly cleaner interface. Let me show you: http://r.im/1rf7 http://r.im/1rf8 Bing has a line-height of 130% which makes it a little more readable in my opinion. Sure it has more clutter in some areas, but the search results are cleaner and that's what matters to me when I'm scanning through them.

I don't use maps, travel, health, etc., so I can't comment on them, but so far I'm very pleased with the results. I didn't think Microsoft could pull it off and they did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_(search_engine)

http://www.bing.com/reference/semhtml/Kumo_(search_engine)?q...

(looks like the May 27 version)

The quality of normal results (the only ones I can get) is bellow Google.

From the US you get powerset-like answers to questions like "president of x".

Fast though. At least they understand that much about why Google won.

It's funny to think that after all the engineering expertise that must have gone into this, they're going to lose because of UI design.

I've thought on more than one occasion while burrowing down with repeated queries that search should involve more of the machine prompting me and less of me guessing at the right keywords. Bing's UI promotes that behavior, whereas my eyes just skip over the recommended queries at the bottom of Google.

Combined with the impressive speed, I think it stands a chance.

Google gives you the advanced search options pane, and then shows you how to format your search query so you can create the advanced search on-the-fly next time (such as by adding -, +, quotes and the like), as they see the command-line interface to their search as superior.

Heh, I love how Microsoft is running a Google ad on "search options" that points to Bing.

MS is using Akamai as the CDN to deliver search results, hence it is fast.

On the plus side for Bing, the hover-over shows the information we want the user to see, and manages to highlight our five most popular platforms. (Not the first five in our header, which is very impressive.) Google doesn't do the site links for us, even though we've obeyed their best practices. This is good for Bing.

But Bing doesn't do as well with restrictive searches - for example, Google does significantly better than Bing for a search on [dawdle.com] - Bing strips out the .com and treats it very similarly to a search on [dawdle], i.e. treating it as a dictionary term. The [dawdle.com] search on Google brings up a number of news/blog articles about the site.

Also, Bing utterly fails on e-commerce searching, even though they bought Jellyfish and are pushing Cashback heavily. I tried [dawdle zelda] on both, then clicked on "Shopping" for both. Here are the results:

http://www.google.com/products?q=dawdle%20zelda&oe=utf-8...

http://www.bing.com/shopping/search?q=dawdle+zelda&mkt=e...

I don't care what you say, a null set is just wrong. Now, yes, we do feed Google Product Search, but that's Microsoft's fault - they shut down the free feed test they had in favor of their paid Cashback search. Dawdle doesn't participate in Cashback, so they don't get a feed. But to fail on that search is crazy; it's on Shopping, and the user's inputted a product search term and indicated a store preference. Google gets this exactly right. (Bing should slurp the GPS feed anyway - the URL is indexable.)

Functionally it's disappointing. The context and use case-sensitive thing that is hinted at in the preview video seems almost entirely absent. The preview vid suggested that they will aggregate hotel information, flight information, etc, to create a grander unified experience - I have not seen any of this. Searching for hotels in a city doesn't give me anything except your traditional search results.

The categories are well thought out - but undifferentiated from Google's search term suggestions as it is.

Sadly, this launch seems a bit like the cuil launch - functionally incomplete, but in the web world you really only get one launch.

The bing logo, on the other hand... the font is poorly chosen, IMHO the kerning is all wrong, it feels like something one would whip up in 10 minutes in Paint, not a professional logo. Furthermore, the choices of font gives me the feeling that they're trying to position this thing as hip and cool (hence the bistro comment), where the system is, as of yet, deserving of none such accolades.

For example, with the live id and being logged in, I think it would be neat if these background images eventually ended up being something relevant to me rather than something generic.

Right now, there is definitely room for improvement, but I wouldn't say it's downright bad.

http://www.novell.com/linux/download_linux.html

Trying the same thing on Google, however, I get this:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

HMMM...

Hmmm...

I did a sample search ("rack mount computers") and found 3 different areas for ads on Bing and a single area (well, google shopping, which isn't 100% the same thing) on Google. You'd think with this being MS, they'd burn profitability (e.g. ads) in exchange for market size?

One good point for Bing, however: the results page isn't as 1994ish as Google. Good use of color, less blaring blue-and-underlined text, and an actual layout.

The nebula graphic, however, doesn't make any sense to me. I think Google's pages could use an overhual -- not more stuff on there, just clean up the colors and graphics a bit, like the ubuntu version of google's search page.

Edit: also, the hover box doesn't show up reliably for me (FF3, Opensolaris). When it does show, it matches the background so well I hadn't noticed it until others had mentioned it here.

Overall, a good point's made from this: the search game is probably going to shift towards context sensitivity and user experience. General search is an area where multiple parties (Google + MS) can do a decent job.

PS: My girlfriend asked if it they called it 'bing' because it makes a 'bing' noise when you search. I laughed but then I thought this would be amusing. Anybody know how would I set about doing such a thing? I'm not a web coder.

I can't help thinking of the Monty Python sketch about "The Machine that goes 'Ping'".

http://www.bing.com/search?q=creative+commons+sound+effects

http://www.google.com/search?q=creative+commons+sound+effect...

There's very little overlap in the first page results, and freesound.org, #1 in Google, doesn't even make Bing's first page.

I'd definitely call that search a win for google. There are far more useful sources of creative commons sound effects in google's first page.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-231154.html

"Internet investment firm CMGI plans to spend more than $100 million on a 12-month advertising campaign that trumpets major changes aimed at transforming its AltaVista Web directory into a top-tier portal player, sources say."

Alas, the ad blitz didn't do much to revive AltaVista, and it won't be the size of the marketing campaign spend that determines what happens for Bing.

The logo doesn't look that cool to me.

There are lot of unwanted random stuff in the UI. Not clean.

Bing's "Help" is actually really nice and very fast (in Chrome). Or at least I found it easy to navigate through it.

Bing isn't indexing bug.gd error/solutions properly, though, so that's a bit frustrating.

Bing is definitely very fast. Sometimes felt faster than Google.

Yes, Bing does feel really fast, but it's not like I've often felt like I was waiting too long for a Google result.

What a disappointment.

The results are exactly what I expect, as good (or nearly so) as Google.

The only exception being advanced query syntax: wildcards in phrases, the ".." range operator, etc. But that's something I can forgive on day 1...

I don't know if Microsoft has ideas for beating Google in the business model arena, but I wouldn't put it past them.

I dunno. In some ways, bing seems more aesthetically pleasing than google. I really liked the infinite image scroll as some others have mentioned.

Big disappointment...

It'll be interesting to see if the extraneous features catch on or not. The treatment of large companies is nice: http://www.bing.com/search?q=fry%27s

And a pretty photo versus the occasional Google Doodle is just a matter of taste. I like the photo myself.

An ideal search engine should return exactly one result!

2 Issues.

- the name is awful. really bad. I can "get" the inspiration ("bing and your search is done") but it clearly was a guy in a suit who likes to wave his hands about and yell WICKED alot who came up with it. Baaaaad. :)

- the layout is a bit clunky. Huge graphic on the main page seems to serve no purpose. Will they be rotating that? ON the search results page the list is offset from the left. That feels wrong (might just be due to google habit) and hard to scan. Also the results column could be wider.

Other than that - seems usable!

Curiously, I searched for a youtube video and the Bing summary says

"Sorry for the interruption. We have been receiving a large volume of requests from your network. To continue with your YouTube experience, please enter the verification code below."

Has their spider been abusing Youtube.com?

Only thing I don't like is that I can only set 50 results per page, whereas with Google and Yahoo I can set 100.

I'm gonna set it as my homepage for a few days. That's the only way I'll be able to give it a try and come up with a judgment.

The hover-triggered contexts don't really provide me with much more than the summary below the title. Seems redundant.

The left navigation bar I thought was supposed to have a bunch of cool features. I'm only seeing my search history. That may be a nice to have, but it isn't a game changer.

The snow leopard is awful, and isn't that the Mac line of products?

http://www.bing.com/search?q=ijigg&go=&form=QBLH

(I'm running FF 3.0.10 on ubuntu...)

Seems to provide less search options/customiations than Google. (unless I'm missing it?)

Lacks moderation of search results. (hide/promote/comments)

Seems to lack a separate category for searching news.

Video search with hover-play thumbnails is nice but no description?

The links to MSN & Live at the top amuse me for some reason.

Overall it seems to be a good replication of where Google was about 2 years ago. I'd say when they set it as the default homepage in Windows a lot of people will continue to use it since it's "good enough"

I was shocked that the top-left options feel exactly as if it was google to me (though they differ slightly). It's as though I thought that layout was owned (trademarked) by Google.

    Web Images Videos News Maps More
    Web Images Video  Maps News Shopping Gmail more

As usual, it is good at finding queries where not many pages apply.

But for competitive search terms, they don't sort the it right.

Better than Live though... give it 5 more years.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50649

Basically moved the results more against the left side and the "aside" bar is moved to the right.

Layout may be a little touchy as I did this more for demonstration than anything else.

------------------------

My 90 second road-test

I actually prefer the search results UI to google's. It's clean and I'm really digging the smart side-bars.

1a. A search for "python" yields a sidebar with sections for "Overview, Community, Software, Development"

1b. Google gives me a list of results

2a. "Zurich" yields a sidebar with "Weather, Map, Real Estate, Travel, Restaurants"

2b. Google gives me an embedded map, and then a list of results.

------------------------

It's a small difference which obviously Google could replicate but at this point in search, the results from all the big players seem to be converging at "very good" so UI is really the only place to innovate anymore and I have to give it to MS on this one.

We'll see how it holds up to daily use but so far, I'm quite impressed.

I think the issue is caused by improper exception handling in the way that Bing's video preview tries to retrieve frames of preview thumbnails, but it can't find any for the source. The QA might not have caught it with a release version of Flash, but it's an issue for web dev's with the debugging version of Flash player. I know that Bing is in "preview" edition, but someone should file the bugs with Microsoft.

Show just the results for Conelly.

  1. Connelly Skiis

  1. Connelly Skiis

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Conelly

Hey, look at that, it works.

Overall it seems pretty decent - the results are quite different from Google on some queries, but not necessarily in a bad way, and it's just as fast.

+ Nice to see MS actually start to working with open source.

+ They've learned from Google.

+ The representation of image search results is good.

+ Video search is also good.

- The name doesn't really rock.

- MS still has to learn a bit about simplicity.

- Search results are still same as bad old live?

Whats the obsession with nebula?

The image searcher is decent though.

not terribly impressed...

google, wikipedia and now bing.

While I realize in the long term, you will need localized data for wherever you live for queries to be more useful, if you want to get a test of the technological platform and how it differs from google, chances are you wont see many until you set it to US-mode.

Google does :)