The Hindu : Front Page : Bing comes with a bang into search business

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Sunday, Jun 14, 2009
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Bing comes with a bang into search business

T. Ramachandran and Sruthi Krishnan

Microsoft’s new tool is designed to make user’s life simpler

KOCHI/CHENNAI: In Chinese, it means a certain answer, or response to a query. It is also short, easy to spell and say and more attractive than ‘Live Search.’ And so Bing was born.

Microsoft unveiled its new search engine called Bing ( www.bing.com) recently in a bid to muscle its way into the Google-dominated world of search.

The need for Bing, according to Rishi Srivastava, Marketing Office, Microsoft Consumer & Online India, stemmed from a “very real dissatisfaction with search” as it is today.

According to the Microsoft’s research, the results for 50 per cent of the queries do not satisfy users, who end up abandoning or refining their search effort.

In an attempt to make the user’s life simpler, Bing “has been designed to meet the needs of today’s searchers who are using search for purposes beyond ten blue links on a page,” says Mr. Srivastava.

The features highlighted by Mr. Srivastava have two aims — making search easier and more organised.

For instance, the autosuggest feature that guesses what you are trying to type, or the ‘document preview’ which lets you hover over the search result and see a preview of the site’s content, are features that make the searching process simpler.

Instant answers

The ‘Best Match’ is an attempt to reduce the number of clicks, by trying to provide the relevant information for your query up front. In case of direct queries, the ‘instant answers’ feature does what its name indicates — say, you are searching for a flight number, the recent flight information will be displayed up front.

‘Quick Tabs’ is a feature that helps make search more organised. “For example, when searching for a favourite musician, the Quick Tabs let you filter results by albums, biography, videos and images,” says Mr. Srivastava.

The video search also provides a preview if you hover over a particular result. And instead of navigating from one page to another all results are offered in an ‘infinitely’ scrolling page. Bing also offers image, news and map-based search.

Helping travellers

It has also identified shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research as areas of particular focus. Bing Travel, which has already been launched, offers tools and and features to help travellers make ‘more informed decisions.’ In the Indian context, though it comes up with flight and hotel information relating to the country, the prices are listed in dollars, which seems to indicate that it is not exactly tuned to the local market as of now.

The question is: Has the Bing made an impression on the users? “It has barely raised the Microsoft’s share of clicks by about 5 per cent from what it had earlier, which is a market share gain of less than 1 per cent overall,” says Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm, a digital marketing firm, which is also into search engine advertising. There had been a rise in traffic to Bing from June 1 to 6, he says, but that had since declined by half and was dropping every day back towards its original level.

Beta version

But Bing now is in its Beta version. And Mr. Srivastava says, “We recognise that we still have much work to do in certain markets to achieve competitive parity, and until we reach those critical milestones, we will keep the beta tag on the product.”

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