What I like about Bing

by phil on Monday Jun 1, 2009 2:28 PM
user experience

It seems that the resounding opinion of the blogosphere on Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, is "Hey, it's not bad!"

This is hilarious to me.

Having said that, I did try out Bing, and I agree, it's not bad! Actually, it addresses a feature that really bugged me about Google.

Don't you hate typing in a bunch of keywords into Google, then when you click on search results, you can't find the keywords on that page? Even if you use the "+" trick in the search expression, you'll still get pages with none of that content. Then you have to hit "Back" and go to the cached version, only to find that the keywords aren't there. All in all, you wasted about 30 seconds.

Bing has a new feature that gives you expanded contexts when you mouse over search results:

This is really cool! So in the spirit of trying new things, I'm going to make Bing my default search engine on Firefox for at least this week.

Bing passes the essential pre-requisites to be the alternative Google:

Does it have comprehensive search results? From my cursory attempts, it does. Check.

Is it snappy? Yup. Check.

Okay.