Microsoft’s new search engine Bing excels at finding a good restaurant.
Unlike Google, which generally returns links to mere web sites, Bing crawls listings at review services like Yelp.com and CitySearch. It then summarizes the results and displays a scorecard for each, rating things like service, drinks, food, wait time, lunch offerings, and so on, all laid out in a neat comparative table.
Bing is also great at finding travel information. Activating the travel tab puts you in a full-service reservation system. From there you can book tickets and even get tips about when to buy to get the best price.
Wired.com was invited to test-drive the new search engine last week during its beta phase, under the old moniker, Kumo, and we discovered lots of little gems like these.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Bing.com to the public on Thursday, as expected, at the All Things D conference in San Diego. It will go live worldwide by June 3.
But if Microsoft has come up with a clear improvement over Live.com — the also-ran search portal that Bing replaces — it doesn’t quite go far enough to make us feel that it’s time to dump Google.
On the positive side, we discovered Bing does much more than search for relevant links. It retrieves and processes data, and renders it smartly. That makes finding a great restaurant or an airline ticket, a snap.
But the service is far from perfect. Beautiful data mash-ups coexist side-by-side with perplexing interface choices that make it hard to find the best features. Meanwhile, actual search results were inaccurate in some cases, and disappointing overall in the local search category, one of the areas Microsoft hopes to make its biggest splash.
Notable improvements in general searches include the addition of related searches based on semantic technology from PowerSet, a search company Microsoft purchased in 2008.
Microsoft's main search box now features suggestions as you type, which is especially useful when typing a word whose spelling is unclear to you.
Bing also keeps track of your search history and displays it prominently. It's easy to turn off, and since it's always visible it’s easy to remember it’s on, unlike Google's less obvious approach.
These are nice upgrades, but they are mostly small tweaks and tricks. The real magic is in the company's new Local, Shopping and Travel pages.
Here Bing packs some real innovation, especially as it comes to synthesizing information and summarizing it. Unfortunately, Microsoft chose a confusing interface, and cluttered it with paid listings, and as a result, many people will have to search around just to discover they can search for this information at all.
For local search, typing something intuitive such as "sushi san francisco" returns a plain vanilla list of links and a map, which is not very interesting.
You can drill a lot deeper by clicking tiny “Local” and “More Listings” links. The latter takes you to a page where you can reorder results by rating, price, atmosphere, parking and whether a place accepts credit cards. That's cool.
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