What would make me bing June 2, 2009
Posted by inukonda in Uncategorized.trackback
Since everyone seems to be talking about Bing – MS’ new search engine, I figured I’d throw in my few cents as well. To start with, MS has actually released a pretty good v1 product in a long time. The focus seems to be Bing v/s Google. I don’t think that is the right argument, the right conversation should be whether Bing and Google can co-exist. I believe the answer is yes, however I would like to see a few more things from Bing before I make the switch.
1. It is the user interface not the search results: I don’t think the accuracy of the search results is going to determine whether people will use Bing or Google. At the end of the day search results are search results. Give me something different! Give me a better user interface. For example: if I search for something, give me a visual depiction based on categories. Say, if I search for “semantic web”, give me results categorized by news articles, blogs, research reports etc. in a nice visual form.
2. Topical Search: Recognize the search category and do a deep search. For ex: if I searched for ‘french restaurants in beacon hill’, I’d like for Bing to give me a list of french restaurants in Beacon Hill, a list of reviews from Yelp, a list of available reservation times from Open Table. Same thing for a flight search, give me a kayak like experience.
3. More is not always better: Limit the search results. Google gives me like 20,000 results for every search but I never go beyond Page 2. So what’s the point? Bing should limit the search results to say 20 but give me confidence that the 20 are what I need.
4. Store my search: Right now after a search, if I find something important – I bookmark it or store it in a xls file for that topic or something like that. And I notate each bookmark so I can refer to it later. Get rid of this behavior for me completely. Store the searches that I did and then also give me a visual history so I can go back and easily reference what I did. I never want to bookmark, tag – ever again.
5. Improve local search: An easy way that Bing can get people to use them is by focusing on local search. Google already does this, but it is not good enough. What I’d like to see from Bing is to create pages for local businesses and let the business owners personalize these pages. So when I search for “coffee, harvard square” – I should get 3 or 4 results and each result should be that of a webpage of the coffee store (if it has one) and if it does not have one, there should be a Bing created landing page for that business with more information. In effect, Bing will become the one stop shop for all local businesses. This will change the game. (Fred Wilson proposed somehting similar at some point, but I cannot find the link to that post)
Bottomline, I think Bing and Google can and should co-exist. Competition is always good for innovation! Looking forward to the search wars!
Awesome bava….i tried out the bing and i must say that it still has a long way to go before it can start threatening google
[...] site . This is based on technology that MS acquired from Farecast. Like I mentioned in a previous post, MS needs to focus on “topical search” and differentiate itself. I am getting closer [...]
I feel that its the vertical specialization which caught the eye. They are really better in presenting structured/classified data in the 4 verticals they are specializing in. As you know my wife works in the bing health search team and I believe they do a phenomenal job in distinigushing themselves in that area as compared to Google.