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Bing Rolling Out New Features

Picture of Honcho Honcho : Aug 11, 2009 4:19:01 PM

Not long ago, in fact June this year, Microsoft launched a new search engine named Bing to take over MSN Search. According to comScore data, Bing’s short life span has shown it growing in market share in the US. It is currently nearing 10 percent share with Yahoo falling to around 18 percent while Google continue to grow sitting at 65.4 percent. Bing’s UK market share is much lower; it was only out of beta last week.

There have been many updates released since Bing’s launch; these have included improvements to features such as the user interface, maps, visual search, index enhancements, Twitter integration and Twitter search. Bing has now done more research on how to improve user experience. Henry Hall, a member of Bing’s Product Management team said on Bing’s Official Blog “we talked to people in small groups all across the nation, we worked with search pioneers outside the company to get their take on what we were missing.” The new changes are starting to roll out in the U.S market so not everyone will see these changes yet, however, I would like to give you a brief overview on a few of the new additions. The user interface of the homepage has not changed much, the main changes lie when you interact with Bing. If you hover your mouse over the categories on the left, more search options are displayed. For example, if we take “Travel” from the screenshot below, a pop-up menu displaying “Search flights” and “Find hotels” appears.

Within “Search Flights”, there is an “Instant Answer” feature where you can enter flight information such as destination and travel dates. You can then get flight recommendations through “Bing Travel”, which offers suggestions on the cheapest times to fly.

Another useful feature is the addition of displaying nutritional information when searching for food items. The biggest addition to Bing in terms of search is the infusion of Wolfram Alpha’s algorithms. Google fails to solve complex mathematical formulas whereas Bing shines. The algorithms will help Bing when calculating nutritional information and improve the ability to solve complex maths equations. Is Bing trying too hard to improve in other areas instead of focusing more on search? Let’s discuss… To find out more on the new additions, read Bing’s Official Blog.