Bing Preview First Impressions: A Bust?

Bing is Microsoft’s new next generation search engine decision engine. Bing has been highly anticipated almost everyone who has used it.

In the above screenshot you’ll notice that under the bing logo it says preview. What that means is that you will only be able to use basic search features (ie.: Search, Images, Videos, News & Maps). Furthermore because this is a preview Bing’s bots have not crawled all of the internet yet which means that only about 5% of webpage's are currently available on the search engine decision engine.

New Features :

Like I said above all of the most of the new features (except the explorer bar) are currently not available!

The Explorer Bar is what makes searching on Bing so rich. Rather than giving you pages and pages of results it cuts the results down into sections. The Explorer Bar is located on the left side of the webpage. When I searched for “Jonas Brothers” in Bing the explorer bar divided the results into:

1. Lyrics
2. Biography
3. Albums
4. Tour
5. Posters
6. News
7. Videos

When I clicked on Biography I only got results about the Jonas Brother’s Biography, which saves lots of time.

Bing also provided Related Searches to help me find more helpful information and, provided search history. Like Google and Yahoo! Bing inserted News, Videos, and Photos right into the results.

Bing has a very interesting preview feature. In addition to putting snippets from the website below each result, if you hover your mouse over a result Bing will show a couple of paragraphs of content on the webpage. This really helped me when deciding which websites to go to. The preview feature also provides links that are on the webpage.

Unlike Live Search videos that are inserted into the results will play when the mouse is hovered over a video.

The Video Search feature has changed slightly. When you click on a Video result the video plays while still showing the results below. It also has the capability to play videos in High Definition.

Bing has many more features but they wont be released until June 3rd. I will talk about the not yet released features in my final review.

Search Results

Like I said before Bing is still in preview stage therefore it has only crawled less than 5% of webpage's. On June 3rd when Bing comes out of preview stage it should have most pages crawled. Despite the fact that Bing has not yet crawled all web pages it gave me excellent results. Unlike with Google and Yahoo! most of the results there were of use.

Final Thoughts

Bing provided an excellent searching experience. It was a disappointment that not all features were available and that not all web pages were crawled. I found the features that are available very useful, and the new search algorithms gave the most useful results. Because Bing is in the preview stage I will not be recommending it but when it is fully released I may change my recommendation.