Bing Bang Boom! Bing Announces New and Enhanced Features and Tools
Bing has gone announcement crazy with numerous new and enhanced services becoming available.
Let's take a look at some of the highlights. If you don't have time to do the reading, no problem, you can visit the Discover Bing page and take the tour.
+ Connect your Twitter and Facebooks accounts to Bing Mobile, "and see combined status updates from your friends from within the Bing app."
Turns out that over 40% of the time when people ask ambiguous queries that don’t have a defined answer (like where should I go to eat tonight), social networks are faster at providing a great answer than traditional search engines.
...you’ll see web results along with relevant results from your social network. So if you search for a movie, you’ll see movie showtimes first, then anything your friends may have said about it next.
+ Barcode-Scanning
You can now use your camera to scan barcodes and cover art to scan for comparison shopping info.
+ Movies
Now Bing Mobile for iPhone includes trailers, easier to read showtimes, and access to more video.
OK, that's mobile.
Let's head to the primary Bing.com web site. As an info pro we believe it's essential to know about a wide variety of tools and resources available that on the surface might seem identical to many people they're not. Spend some time with Bing. They have made some serious and useful improvements in the last year and although they are no where close (at least as of today) to Google in market share, they do provide a quality service that is moving quickly to improve.
Remember, bigger doesn't necessarily mean better. Even before this round of announcements we have thought that Bing Image Search and Bing Video Search can play with any competitor. Since day one Bing Maps (formerly MS Virtual Earth) has wowed us. Finally, at least on a few recent drives (Gary) has found driving directions from Bing to be the best. Of course, in terms of maps and directions, many variables come into play.
Some New and Enhanced Features for Bing.com
1. Tabs to various verticals/specialty searches have moved from the left column to directly below the search box. The tabs you see are based on your query.
Bing refers to this as the answer bar.
2. Speaking of verticals, Bing has added more entertainment content. Including tour dates, song lyrics, and get this, "full-length streaming for more than 5 million songs. You get a single play of every song in this 5 million song catalog, and after that 30 second previews."
Those of you who want to learn more and/or have an interest in interface design might want to take a look at this page and take special note of a brief video interview with Bing GM Derrick Connell about how the new "dialog-type approach" was developed.
Finally, this post goes into greater depth about other new or enhanced features:
+ Visual Search
This cool and often fun tool remains available. If you've never tried it, give it a go. If you're an iPhone geek try this one. If the World Cup is your thing, here's a visual search for you.
Much More After a Click
+ News
Looks better but Bing needs to ramp up with more sources.
+ Flight Pricing
Remember, MS acquired a company that predicts fare changes and if you should buy now or wait. The acquisition of FareCast took place in 2008. Southwest Airlines is not included. Structure a query in the form of flights SFO IAD. To get flight arrival info use the airline and flight number. Info is available for both domestic (U.S.) and international flights. Btw, if you don't know the city code, city names also work.
+ Autosuggest--Enter Barack Obama, click the first entry on the dropdown menu and you'll get a bunch of material about the President Obama with the first link taking you directly to a brief bio on WhiteHouse.gov.
About 25% of searches are navigational meaning that users want to go directly to a specific website when searching. To help with this task, Bing now has direct navigation to top websites right within the autosuggest drop down. For example, if you type in “Amazon”, you can click on the first autosuggest link and go directly to amazon.com.
In addition to direct navigation, you can now check the weather right within the autosuggest dropdown. This will give you quick, easy access to today’s weather without the need to load a new results page.
According to Bing, users search for weather info three times a day.
That is a large amount of new and/or enhanced material. Bing appears to us to get better with every release. That's good news for power searchers. However, Bings biggest challenge is really marketing, advertising, and promotion. They have to get people to not only try Bing but to come back on a regular basis. Changing any habit, in this case the Google habit, is a huge challenge.
Another issue for Bing is content. Not only depth of crawl (how many pages taken from each site) but also licensing deals to have exclusive content. Several years ago they began scanning books but then abruptly ended the project. Bill Gates is the owner of Corbis a massive stock photo company that includes the very famous Bettmann Archive. While it seems unlikely, perhaps a limited amount of content from Corbis could become a source for some exclusive Bing content.
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