Where have you ‘Bing’ all my life?
Last week Microsoft announced the beta launch of a brand new search engine called ‘Bing’, To those in the know this comes as no surprise, since there has been lots of chat amongst the Twitterati of a Microsoft search project with a code name of ‘Kumo’.
Whilst the search engines is now fully available for anyone to use, Microsoft are saying that Bing is very much in Beta, and that there is still a lot more to come.
Bing has a few new features, some of which are complete innovations and others which appear to be recycled ideas tried by others in the field.
There’s something called ‘Best Match’ which shows you the best result for popular search queries that other people are performing, And another one called Instant Answers, which gives you the answer to a question actually in the content of the results page, rather than referring you to other websites that might contain the answer,
This second one at least appears to be very similar to the kind of thing recent upstart Wolphram Alpha has been trying to perfect.
Microsoft for its part is anxious to stress that Bing is still only in early stage development, and that there is still much more to come. Bing will be building data based on what consumers search and click on, and then using that data to refine the results it shows. A Microsoft spokesman said that they wanted “to help people find the shortest distance from their initial search query to the point of making an informed decision.”
Have you tried Bing yet? Give it a go, find out if its any good, and leave your comments below.