Fri 5 Jun 2009
As you may have already heard, Microsoft recently released a new search tool called Bing. Bing is a search engine designed to do more than just provide you with a list of links, it aims to organise search results and help you overcome information overload.
Here’s a quick look at some of Bing’s key features.
Quick preview
In Bing when you hover your mouse over the right hand side of a search result a pop up box displays a preview of text from the site. This feature is great for helping you decide which link you want to click through to.
Improved image search
Bing’s new image search has an infinite scroll feature, which means you don’t have to keep clicking ‘Next” at the bottom of the page to see the next page of results, you can just keep scrolling. You can also filter images by things like size and colour.
Video search
One of the great features of Bing’s video search is the ability to preview videos. All you have to do is hover your mouse over a video in the search results and the video thumbnail will play for a few seconds, helping you to decide if you want to click through and see the whole video.
The explorer pane
The explorer pane acts like a table of contents for your search results, allowing you go straight to what you are really looking for. The explorer pane sits to the left of your search results and displays Quick Tabs, Related Searches, and Search History. Quick tabs allow you to quickly refine your search e.g. when searching for New Zealand you are given the option to refine the search to images, maps, weather, real estate, facts, or culture.
Bing is currently in Beta, so there may still be a few glitches to work out. If you would like to try out Bing for yourself you may want to set the country (top right) to United States, as I noticed that the video search option was not available when this was set to New Zealand.
To visit Bing click here. To learn more about Bing click here .