Exploring Bing

New page January 2010

Query and Results | Advanced Search | Tips | More Tools

Bing is Microsoft's latest search engine, launched in May 2009. It's very colourful and it's very good - some even say competitive with Google. Microsoft is marketing it as a "decision engine" because it is pitched to help searchers with making decisions. These tend to be consumer decisions in the areas of travel, health, and shopping, but more "interest" areas may be introduced later.

Colour begins at the welcome screen where a visual from Microsoft's photo gallery of places in the world teases you with questions that are revealed as you mouse over hot spots on the screen. At Bing.com the first page shows an Explore panel as a guide to Bing's attractions.

The search results page has several attractive user interface qualities:

• page preview as you mouse over the item
• categorization and grouping of results on broad queries
• search history

Bing

Bing.ca: Shows option to search only "pages from Canada". In mid-2009 Hitwise, a service that collects and analyzes data on Internet use, found that Bing delivered the most "successful" searches to Canadians. There is a French language interface.

Sympatico and MSN.ca use Bing for web search.

Search Query

Bing catches misspellings and will run the search with the correct spelling as well as the misspelling.

Generally Bing is geared to help searchers with broad searches, especially consumer ones, rather than very specific queries.

Search Results

For the query climate change

Bing looks for All the words. It does some stemming that handles singular, plural and some word variants. On the query strategies for web searching it will pick up search, searches, searching, strategy and strategies. Use the plus sign to turn this off: eg. +searching

Ranking gives weight to established sites, original content on the page, and links - especially links out.

Categories and Web Groups: On broad topical searches Bing will group results into categories derived from its analysis of searches. This works well for health related queries such as blood pressure where you are likely to see Symptoms, Medications, Reference, Images; places - Vancouver Canada - with groupings for map, weather, attractions, real estate; and for retail products (shopping). Other types of searches that Bing handles well include sports, people, entertainment, and events. Each will have a distinct set of groups.

Results are organized into the same groups with headings. At the top of the page are the results that received highest ranking, followed by the Web Groups, each with three or so results. This arrangement helps us "decide" which aspects interest us most and can guide us in exploring the results.

Related Searches: These are search queries that other people have run that seem to be on the same topic. These may be common combinations of your search terms with one or two other words, or strongly related topics. Web Groups is based on this as well but at a generalized level. This list is similar to what Google has in "searches related to".

Search History: Bing records the searches and related activity made during a browser session. It will save these for up to 28 days. The searches are listed in the left panel.

• You may See all history: the words you searched for and the sites visited, along with the date and time of your search. Frequent users will benefit from this. You may delete individual searches.
  
• Other options are to Clear all history, or Turn off the feature. You may also remove the history by clearing the browser cookies. Regardless of what you do, Bing logs search queries and stores these independent of any user identifiers.
  
• Save and Share is an additional option that lets you save, organize, and share your recent searches. More on this in Bing Help.

The Choices

Cached page - Bing shows the date it indexed the page and the page as it was then with the search terms highlighted.

Quick Preview: Passing the mouse to the right of a search result, over a small blue arrow, brings up "More on this page", a quick preview of the target page. This is a very attractive feature and will save you time.

Translation: Sites NOT in English contain translate links next to the page title - see this example for la ville de montreal

Microsoft's translator handles 22 languages.

Real-Time Search

Bing gets a feed from Twitter (Facebook is planned for the future), but it keeps it separate from mainstream web results. All the action is at bing.com/twitter and (Dec 2009) is limited to the United States.

The page takes some study. The top half has a live feed or the four latest tweets. Click on More to get only tweets sorted by time. Below the recent tweets on the first page is a list of links that have been shared through tweets.

Search results pages themselves are likewise split into two sections, a live feed at the top with just four tweets, and a list of shared links at the bottom. Results stream in live at the top of the page, but you can pause the influx.

Advanced Search

Advanced search allows progressive refinements to the query.

Here you can:

1. Add terms
2. Limit to a site or domain
3. Limit to a country or region. Limiting to Canada works quite well.
4. Limit by language

But you can't limit to words in title or a filetype. To do these, you must use Bing's Advanced Search keywords.

Tips and Shortcuts

Bing has some quick answers.

• Weather - place + weather - toronto weather
• Definitions - define + word - define precarious
• Facts - state the fact you want - population of canada - taken from Freebase
• Nutritional information - enter the question - calories in peanut butter - from Wolfram/Alpha
• Conversions - 5 miles in kilometers
• Calculations - 23% of 85 - from Wolfram/Alpha
• Athletes - data on players and teams - Tomas Plekanec

More Search Tools

Reference: This is a natural language tool for getting answers from Wikipedia and Freebase. Bing Reference uses the natural language technology of Powerset. It works quite well for questions of fact. Search results from Reference are sometimes included in web search results.

xRank: Bing ranks people results according to who the world is searching for most. It's a kind of "who's hot list". Applies mainly to US celebrities and notables. But it's not limited to people - xRank is really reporting on popular search topics.

Bing Image Search and Video Search - see Multimedia Search