BING: Microsoft’s Engine, The Second Encounter

Bing and Decide?

Following my previous posts (the first encounter) about the launch of Microsoft’s Decision Engine, today, I visited again their website and it is now finally live and online (although in beta mode).

BING? – I guess what Microsoft is trying to say here is “search”. So when you search for something you actually Bing:) So much for that and as an example, let us Bing for the term “Make Money With Bing”. This query will return 3.7 million results, and Bing(o), the number one spot at this moment is being occupied by my previous post. Not bad, considering that the post was published some 12 hours ago. While I am flattered, I do not believe that my post was written with the intent to “make money with Bing”. I did mention something about that possibility but that’s all. Why am I telling you this? Simple, quality of results. Read on.

DECIDE? – From these results, hovering your mouse on top of any result will pop-up an excerpt from that query (see image below – click to enlarge). This is particularly useful because it allows to you preview an excerpt of what you are going to “encounter” or see prior to visiting the page. If you like what you see, then this is the time to “decide” and visit the page.

This is just an example of what Bing and Decide, in my view is about. Also, if you noticed, the page’s look and feel resembles to that of whom? It has the same goodies as Mr G’s magic box. You can calculate, translate currencies, get weather forecast, etc..

What else?

Page Rank Vs. xRank

PageRank I believe no longer needs any introduction as we all know about it. However, it is the first time that I encounter with xRank.

What is xRank anyway? xRank keeps track of notable people and puts them in order for you. Bing web searches are counted for movie stars, musicians, and other famous people (you for example, hehe). The findings are then compiled into an insightful ranking formula (?) that tells you who the world is searching for most. The end result is a cultural snapshot of who’s hot and who’s not! Who said personal branding wasn’t important anyway? Well, I am sure there will be more to come about xRank in the future.

Quality Of Results?

Now, I am in trouble. As I said, this is my second encounter with Bing and by all means I am a Certified Power Searcher of Bing yet. While keyword searches appear to be of good quality, I can not say the same about images and specially video searches. At this moment, Bing returns some really dubious results when it comes to video search. Just to give you an example, I did a search for the term “cheap hotels in …”. When I clicked on the video results, one result was an inappropriate site (safe search on) and other results where from the same website (yahoo related).

It appears that I am not alone on this. Inquistr posted recently an article about their first impression and I must admit that they were a little harsh by going as far as saying that Bing is a Fraud. This obviously is not good for Bing and given the time they have been online, I am sure they are working hard to rectify these flaws. We’ll see.

Over to you. Did you try using Bing yet? What do you think of it?