Microsoft’s much heralded replacement for Live Search, the strangely named “Bing”, went live a week ago, and we’ve been testing it (quite reluctantly in some cases) company-wide for the last week. Here are some random observations:

1. On the Spanish version, some of the options are capitalised but some are not – “Web” and “Imágenes” (images) are capitalised, but “compras” (shopping) isn’t, for instance. Also, “solo Español” should read “solo español” (as “Spanish” isn’t capitalised in the language). Bad attention to detail here
2. The video streaming function is great! Undertake a video search and you can preview the videos without going to the page
3. The page preview function is interesting too, though how important this ends up being is debatable as the search engine will have to learn the best part of the page to preview to be truly useful. Also, it take a while to load some of the previews
4. The search engine seems to place less emphasis on page titles than Google, but the overall imporession is that it seems to return broadly relevant results nonetheless
5. It doesn’t offer suggestions as you’re typing into the search box in the way Google does – we didn’t realise how hooked on this we were until we didn’t have it

Overall, we are less than impressed and most of us have switched back to Google. To be fair, Microsoft have obviously got a long game plan here, and the fact that it seems to be trialling some genuinely different search algorithms must broadly be a good thing.

This is of course only a beta, and it is something we will continue to monitor with interest.

Phil Morse