Comments on: Bing balloons into public view

Microsoft's big bet on search begins to be publicly available, with the opinions rolling in fast and furious.

[Pointedly]

Ahah! You'll notice, in the Bing balloon image, there are no Flight Simulator X aircraft in the sky. With all the money to be made from Bing, Microsoft should be able to bring together a staff of Flight Simulator developers for a renewed ACES Studio. The old ACES Studio never had nearly the number of developers or amount of investment needed to adequately move Flight Simulator and its related technologies to where they should have been.

[rtuinenburg]

No search engine can compete with Google, because Google has become a verb in so many peoples mind. If you think search, you think Google, bottom line. If new search engines come along with bells and whistles, Google will just enhance their search engine, if a certain bell or whistle becomes popular. No big deal to play catch up if needed.

Listen up Google, I think you should run your search engine in TWO modes. By default the search engine should only show links that are popular clicked on links for each search term, then if the user wants to look at all the links, then they can go into that mode. Use all the historical click data. I think that would really clean up your results, and not make your results so daunting.

[dennis_the_bug]

A PoS search engine. I tried to search some financial stuff on it, it gave me sex stuff. Search for W F Sharpe or Blume Beta on "Bing" and same word on Google. Google is much much much better than Bing.

[moshelinho]

i never go to any search engine to make a search, I just type in whatever im looking for in the address bar and press enter and it searches using google, this works on Chrome, firefox, opera and Internet Explorer 8.......... (those which i use everyday)

so when google is the default search engine everywhere, how does microsoft or for that matter any competitor of google expect people start using their search engine

[kieranmullen]

Has anyone tried searching "linux" in bing.com Interesting that the first several responses are tailored for Microsoft and Windows. hmm ok back to google.

[CNET editors' note: Prohibited content deleted.]

[monkeyfun14]

Really? Microsoft never even came up in the search.

[Jane in KC]

I don't pretend to know much about search - except what everyone knows: how it works for me. Yes, I comprehend something about indexing, etc., but I go back to the bottom line for all of us, which is our personal experience. In the past I have said MS should stay out of search because they didn't know anything about it. Stick with what they are experts in. But that's why I'm not in charge at MS. Bing is good. I tried it for the first time today, and it returned the "right answer" three hits down on a search Google didn't accomplish yesterday or again today anywhere on its first page (I didn't look any further). That may be a first - but it's a BIG first!

[Whiskey1441]

Doing a search for a map of WY never showed up, even after about 10 minutes. Did the same search on Google, right away there it was. Bing still has some bugs to get rid of. Regarding a regular search, it was alright but not good enough for me to make it my default search.

[manodud]

my take on bing:

- firstly, i dont hink there was enough initial buzz
- 'Related search' section (a la ask.com) is good
- shopping results are pretty well presented although 'comparison view' is less intuitive than google product search.
- the search result preview is probably the big difference - saves time - although preview bar could be more intuitive - ask.com's binocular actually stands out when you look at the search result. I find xmarks on google useful. so i dont know if I would switch to bing for this functionality.
- although video results page has filters like 'resolution' screen-size' etc, the video results playback is a rip off from ask.com
- news - isnt as convincing to make me switch from google news and my aggregated igoogle gadgets
- maps - is it really any different from live maps?? (no, as far as i could tell from google's cache - since microsoft isnt letting you go to maps.live.com any more)
- having said all this, much of the user experience depends on how the sponsored listings are preesented
- travel - surprisingly good presentation and great results - only to realize a few minutes later that its a major rip-off of kayak.com - including the time slider. results - results on both were the same though, so credit for that

so to crudely summarize, presentation ideas from powerset (the company they acquired a couple of years back) + refined rip-offs from ask.com + farecast's tech for travel + a nice 'ctrl+c ctrl+v' of kayak.com

[conan547]

If Microsoft plans to take on Google, they better start crawling and indexing sites a little faster. For example, one of our blogs was indexed by Google in 3 days and started getting traffic in one week. Bing only has the home page listed. It's the same with other webmasters I've spoken to. It takes way too long to get indexed.

Adding a bunch of new tools helps, but ultimately Bing will have to make fresh content available faster than Google if the want to compete head-on. Good luck with that!