Mini-Review: Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine (Verdict: It’s Pretty Smart)

Although Microsoft hopes you’ll warm up to its new search engine Bing so much that you’ll ditch Google entirely, it wants you to start out using Bing to help you shop. Leveraging its acquisition of FareCast, Bing distinguishes itself from its rivals by, among other things, predicting airfares.

Dubbed a Decision Engine, Bing was designed to be streamlined enough for everyday searches (precisely the kind you’re used to doing through Google or Yahoo), but smart enough to provide additional information, such as reviews and flight stats, that will help users make informed decisions while shopping online.

Although Bing was announced last week, today is the first day it’s fully available. Read on for our first impressions.

Interface

Because of its resemblance to the stock Windows wallpaper, the landscape background on Bing’s search page immediately brands it as a Microsoft search engine. Although more colorful, by far, than Google’s white home page, it’s still simple, with just a search bar placed front-and-center.

Like Google, it has tabs for images, video, shopping, maps, and news (as well as travel, Bing’s chosen niche), but whereas Google lines them discreetly along the upper edge of the screen, Bing displays them more prominently, on the left-hand side of the screen.

Although easy to sift through, Bing’s search results appear more cluttered than Google’s. Both list top results, followed by shopping, and, finally general search results with ads on the right-hand side. But Bing also has categories (e.g. photos) listed along the top and left-hand side, which seems redundant.

Also on the left-hand side are related searches, as well as your search history. These features add some useful functionality to the site, but they also come at the price of a more Zen-like interface.

Travel

Thanks to Microsoft’s acquisition of FareCast, Bing takes aim at aggregators such as Expedia, Travelocity, and Kayak, and serves as a flight search service unto itself. In fact, Bing compiles information from such popular travel sites. Using nifty sliding scales on the left side of the screen, you can adjust the departure and arrival times, as well as the airlines you’d consider. As you make changes, the search results update dynamically.

Best of all, a colorful icon in the upper-left corner advises whether or not to pounce on these prices or to, say, wait a week. It uses historical flight pricing data to make these predictions. Unfortunately, though, this feature doesn’t work with every city, although it covers the biggies (it covers New York’s JFK and San Francisco, for example, but not Barcelona or San Antonio). You can tell if your city is included if it appears in bold when you fill out the intial search fields.

When you decide on a flight, you can click the link to be taken straight to the airline ’s booking page, so that you can skip the kind of booking fees you’ll get on some travel sites.

Shopping

Every major search engine is capable of displaying shopping results, but Bing is unique in that it also compiles user reviews from sources around the Internet. Impressively, it locates the positive and negative sentences, picks the relevant ones, and slips them into Bing’s pros-and-cons format.

Although not perfect (a user review for a camera listed its lack of a touchscreen as a con), it’s still a quick way of gauging user feedback (for the record, we recommend reading the quote in its original context).

Multimedia Searches

Although not billed as prominently as its flight search capabilities, Bing’s multimedia search features are my favorites. I love that the images are cached and appear in one long page, so that you don’t have to click through umpteen pages of results.

Moreover, for both images and videos you can hover over a thumbnail with your cursor to preview it. In the case of images, the photo will pop out a bit, and you’ll also see the resolution. With videos, the clip will actually start playing so that you know what you’re getting before you clip and start streaming and buffering.

Everyday Searches

Although Bing excels, specifically, in long sessions having to do with booking airfare, shopping, or some other time-consuming activity, Microsoft hopes you’ll also use it for quick, everyday searches.

Depending on what you search for, Bing will show a Best Match. For instance, when we typed in nytimes.com all we saw was the link to The New York Times Web site, with a link beneath for other search results.

But other times, you’ll see other results beneath the Best Match, which defeats the purpose of it since it’s no longer presented as a lone, easy-to-click link. Unless  you search for something specific, such as “nytimes.com,” this is what you’re likely to see. Check out what happened when we searched for “Energy Star.”

In cases like these, Bing’s Best Match algorithm is little more than a gimmick.

The Verdict

Taking a realistic look at the competition (ahem, Google), Microsoft wisely added some niche features to Bing, its new search engine. It handles shopping and, in particular, flight searches so thoroughly that you could use it as a substitute for aggregators like Expedia and Kayak.

Moreover, its multimedia interface, complete with hovering previews, is more intuitive than Google’s, by far. For shoppers and power users who love additional features, it’s a strong entry into the search engine space.

But for people who want to do quick searches, and maybe even know what they’re looking for, Google’s simpler interface makes for a more streamlined experience.