Is Microsoft’s New Bing Really New?
Here’s what Microsoft says: Do you ever feel like you’re spending too much time searching and not enough time doing? If so, you’re not alone.
According to a recent survey conducted by Bing and Impulse Research, nearly 75 percent of people spend more time than they would like searching for information online.
Time wasted searching is a thing of the past with the new Bing design, which brings together information from the Web, experts and enthusiasts, and your friends to help you do more — available in the U.S. at http://www.bing.com. Microsoft made this announcement Friday, June 1.
In all the above statements from Microsoft, there is a lot of loose wordiness. Actually, there is a huge gap between the rhetoric and reality. Nothing has changed. If you go to Bing, which Microsoft claims is new, you will find the same old experience – junk in the name of search results.
But one thing is good about Microsoft’s rhetoric that at least it realizes that users are wasting plenty of time on archaic search engines – all of which have failed to improve even after years of their existence in the market.
In fact, today’s Web search that throws you in a jungle of irrelevant data continues to be a pain in the neck. Microsoft is not alone that has realized this fact. Recently, Yahoo! also released something called Yahoo! Axis, which aims to provide a smarter search experience to users.
Axis allows you to enter your search, see and interact with visual results, all without ever leaving the page you are on, according to the company.
Adding more hype to its new offer, Microsoft claims that only Bing brings together the best search with people from social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.
In celebration of this new search experience, it says, Bing is joining forces with DoSomething.org to launch the Bing Summer of Doing, designed to inspire people to do amazing things, including giving back to their communities.
All this ballyhoo is okay. But will Bing allow users to really get the information they want from the search engine? Let Microsoft respond.
