BING - tips and tricks

Now that Bing is available for use outside Microsoft,
here are some quick tips and tricks that will help you do more with Bing.com.

1. Use the full version of Bing

If you are using Bing outside North America, chances are that you seeing
a localized version of Bing that may be missing some features.
For instance, the Indian version of Bing.com doesn’t have search history
and the image on the Bing home page here is not interactive as in the US version.

To explore the full version of Bing, go to this page and set English - US
as your default region. You can now enjoy all the Bing features from anywhere.

2. Track Companies from the IE Favorites Bar

If you search for a company stock (e.g. GOOG or MSFT), Bing will automatically
create a web slice for that company which you may then add to IE 8 and track
the performance directly from the favorites bar.
You need Internet Explorer 8 to try this feature.

3. Watch Preview of Hulu Videos outside US

Hulu hosts some popular popular TV shows but the problem is that
you can only watch these videos if your computer has US based IP address.

However, Bing lets you watch shot previews of Hulu video even outside US.
Just search for any TV show episode on Bing Videos (see example) and
hover the mouse over any of the video thumbnail to watch a short clip.

4. Save and Email search results

With Bing, you can save your search history on to a local folder inside Bing or
to your Windows Skydrive account. Alternatively, you may send your
search queries to a friend via email or publish them on your Facebook wall
via Bing. You’ll need Silverlight to share queries in Bing.

5. RSS Feeds of Search Results

Unlike Google or Yahoo, Bing offers RSS feeds for their web search results
that you can subscribe to inside any feed reader. Your browser should be
able to auto-detect the RSS feed of Bing pages or you can
append &format=rss to any Bing search URL and convert it into a feed.

This RSS feature is not available for Image or Video search in Bing.

6. Find Pages That Link to MP3 Files or Documents

Bing (and Live Search) supports a unique "contains" search operator
that lets you find web pages that contain links to particular file types.

For instance, a search like susan boyle contains:mp3 will show pages
that are about the British singer and that also link to MP3 files.
Replace mp3 with doc to search pages that contain links to Word Documents.

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Bing - bingo for Bing

It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as go Google yourself, but now you can go Bing yourself. (Then again, Google took a few years to become a verb.). Bing, Microsoft’s latest effort to compete in search, is now live on a “preview” site. The key thing to pay attention to is the guided search assistance on the left and the different experiences for the travel, images, video, maps, news, and shopping tabs.

A few things to try:

• An ambiguous Web search: “turkey” (do you want images, recipes, facts, or a map of the country? The topic guides in the left explore pane will help you narrow your search).
• A travel search: “SFO to JFK”
• Video search: “Simpsons” (hover over the thumbnail to play the video)
• Image search: “Rollercoasters” (notice the infinite scroll).
• A health search: “Sore throat”
• Shopping: “Digital SLR” (sort by price or brand, get average ratings and CashBack).
• Maps: “BBQ” (automatically knows what city you are in and offers up geo-appropriate results).
• News Search: “Bing” (what else?)

Check it out. Try a few searches and then tell us in comments if you will ever go back.

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SEARCH= Bing vs Google

That was fast. Irish programmer and SEO specialist Paul Savage has made this very basic web service, which lists all results for search queries on Google and Bing side by side so you can compare which one produces the best results for the keywords you enter on one single page. We’ve played around with it a bit and found that the tool proves that the user experience for both search engines really is very different:

- searching for ‘Google’

Google will show news results about themselves first, and a link to their homepage later, which makes sense since people are probably already on there. The rest of the results consists of Google products and local versions of the search service. Noteworthy difference is the presence of a button that lets you drop down a widget displaying information about Google’s stock without the need to leave the page.

Bing, on the other hand, provides a list of possible extended search queries on the left sidebar, and a list of useful direct links to Google services below the first result. It also lists ’similar’ searches on the right sidebar (not visible in this screenshot) with alternative services - Bing being the first one they recommend. It also displays a box that you can use to jump to Google search, and it keeps track of your search history right on the page, unless you turn that feature off.

- searching for ‘TechCrunch’

Google only shows internal network links on the first SERP with the exception of our Twitter account, Netvibes profile and Wikipedia entry, while Bing mostly shows links to third-party services (Wikipedia, OnSugar, Flux, Blip.tv, AboutUs.org, Facebook, GitHub, Mahalo, etc.). From the viewpoint of TC the company, the latter situation is not ideal, and to top it off running the query on Bing apparently means potential visitors will see the names of competing blogs in the left sidebar. On the upside, you can open the Wikipedia article on TechCrunch on the same page, which makes for a seamless user experience if information about us was what you were looking for.

- searching for ‘Linux’

Using Google, you get much better results for this query, period. Google lists at least five very relevant links (Kernel.org, Debian.org, RedHat.com, LinuxJournal.com and LI.org) that you will not find in the first 15 search results on Bing. No nifty sidebars, nor any amount of spot-on similar results will help Microsoft here.

- searching for ‘Office Space quotes’

Here, Bing takes the top prize, although with this particular query the results are much more similar, which can be attributed to the fact that it is more detailed (three words instead of one like the other examples). Why do I say that? Because Bing is the only one of both that correctly lists the movie Office Space’s Wikipedia entry in the first few results, while Google doesn’t even list until the fifth page of results (both rank Wikiquote quite high). Also, this is where the extended search options in the left sidebar at Bing really shine: ‘Office Space sound clips’, ‘Office Space WAV files’, ‘Office Space Clips’, etc. - that’s the stuff you’d likely be looking for.

It is far too early and this is far too unscientific a research method to jump to any conclusions - we’d need a Jump to Conclusions mat for that - but using Savage’s tool gives you a nice clean overview of what most people who’ve tried both engines today: Google and Bing at the very least feel very different, and while you can argue about the quality of one engine versus the other back and forth as much as you want, it’s painfully clear both need improvement. Of course, if there continues to be no clear winner on the quality front, then Google has already won the battle before it starts, expensive ad campaigns be damned.

That said, please allow me to reiterate a point Michael made yesterday as well as in the past, that I most definitely agree with: Microsoft is damn right not to give up the search game yet like some are suggesting they should. Please stop calling for a monopoly in search, let these companies compete and fight hard for every user, and I’m sure we’ll see more innovation in this space soon enough.

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