Chicky Moves

I just read an article about Google co-founder running around his techies to find about the Live’s new avatar. After miserable failure of Live.com finally Bing is able to give some relevant results. Microsoft’s search engine has gone through torturous incarnation from MSN search to Windows live search to Live search. And its struggle to give and alternate has been fascinating and beneficial, for users at least. Bing gives the reflection of the way search business in moving.  Beyond algorithm on which still Google could still claim superiority, it the comfort of the Googler or Binger (may be in future) which has taken precedence here. Features like preview, instant answers, snapshot are some of the feature which has been incorporated makes the difference.

Although search engine like ask.com has made effort in the past to move in these direction, Google did not bother to tweak its search engine for almost 10 years. And i found it utterly refreshing to find someone to bring Google out of its comfort zone. Following are some of the features which Bing has tried to play with, for the good.

1. Daily changing of background: Bing offers some of the amazing pictures at the background which keep changing everyday. Some of the images are animated which is fun watching
2. Extended preview of search results: This has been by far most effective addition in search engine offering. Instead of scrolling all the 10 pages with out getting the relevant result which you get at Google search result page, here you can get the extended preview of all the result at right pan. This preview which is noticably abled with sufficient content and picture are soothing to fingers
3. Video thumbnail preview with facility to play within Bing: This feature is known more for its controversy than the other wise. Beside the fact that Microsoft improved the content filtering after series of complaints and outcry, its idea of video preview can go a long way in defining the ways to improve video search results. The fact that many a time tags are misleading, there is not credible ways, at least to my knowledge to create auto-tags for the video. In such case a preview might be very handy. The user can also play the video while remaining in the website.
4. Image search with continuously scrolling images: I was frackly surprised by the agility of Bing here which normally i dont associate with microsoft. The website search results appear very dynamic which keeps you awake while searching.
5. Instant results: This is an another killer offering by Bing. It is pleasently surprising to see to- the- point search results on topic ranging from finding the latest score to finding answers to mathematical calcultions. It also does an amazing job in shopping and whole other services.