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Fuzzy Logic Will Bing’s big bang… bash Google?
Fuzzy Logic Will Bing’s big bang… bash Google? | Will Bing’s big bang… bash Google? |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Friday, 29 May 2009 | |
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Page 2 of 3 Search is clearly deeply entrenched in our daily cyber lives. As an example, Ninemsn’s Parsons broke out some interesting figures. Featured Whitepaper
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Back in 1997, there was about 100,000 website, but today, there are “around 160 million distinct sites”. Back in 1997, there were 26 million URLs, today there are over 1 trillion. Likewise, in ’97 there was around 17 TB (terabytes) of content online, but today, it’s around 5 million PB (petabytes), with a petabyte being a thousand terabyes (and a terabyte being a thousand gigabytes). All this content would take approximately 158 million years to download (at least, presumably, at today’s relatively slow “broadband” speeds) – and that’s just the web, not IM, email, SMS or other “online data”. Ninemsn says 49% of Australians search on a daily basis, and 95% use search at least on a monthly basis, with search use growing alongside the amount of searching going on. It also notes that over the last 10 years, not much has changed in search. Although Google has steadily introduced news clips, images, videos and more, Bing’s results take this to the next level of categorization and usefulness, right down to things like “Instant Answer” which aim to give you a definitive answer without even needing to search further through the links. Bing is bringing this new categorization and other features to life because it says that for 75% of users, “search doesn’t work the first time”. This leads to users manually refining their search terms and clicking the “back” button quite often to get away from the page they’re on back to the search results – or simply giving up on the search process! Of course, Google has added “similar search terms” to the bottom of its search results in recent times, while the frequent use of the back button simply indicates users aren’t using their tabbed browsers properly, but it’s what Ninemsn has reported, and it does appear to be accurate. Although Microsoft says that “search does anticipate user intent”, thus highlighting the need for Bing’s improvements, Google has long asked users if they ‘really meant’ this search result or that one (especially in the case of a misspelling), and as just noted, Google has also started offering “related search terms” too. This whole “related search terms” thing is being heavily promoted by Bing, because Ninemsn (and presumably Microsoft’s Search people) have noted that lots of people start with one search (say, Sydney), and then follow it up with “Sydney hotels”, then “Sydney attractions” etc. Another way categorisation works is when searching for images or videos. Here you’ll see categories such as size, length, quality, faces, wall papers, colour or B&W and plenty more. These refinement tools look fantastic and greatly add to the search experience. Better still, the image and video search tools presents an endlessly scrolling list – no more going to the next page of 10 or 20 results – and when it comes to video, or even just text results in a straight search, you get an on-screen preview. The video thumbnail preview starts playing within the list of returned video search results, so you have a better idea of whether you’re going to the right place or not, before you actually go there. So, rather than putting these similar terms at the bottom of the page, Bing has the terms listed clearly on the left hand side of the page, in a user’s direct line of sight. This will help, sayeth Ninemsn, to stop searches becoming “long and repetitive”, which is currently the case with 50% of search sessions greater than 30 minutes in length, with people having to, 50% of the time, refine searches or repeat previous queries. So, to fix this, Bing’s big things are to do the following in 3 key areas: 1. Deliver better results 2. Deliver a better, categorised, organised search experience 3. Deliver the simplification of key tasks Now, in the US, a lot of the promised Bing features are coming online immediately, while Australia will only get some of them, with more to roll out over the next 6 to 12 to 18 months. These features are in the “simplification of key tasks” box, and will include “vertical areas around shopping, travel, local searches, health and more, where the “instant answers” will be properly localised for Australia, with Ninemsn having its own dedicated Microsoft localisation team at hand. The US Bing demos of better results in those "vertical search areas" bring Bing up to the same level as Google's local search results complete with map and local listings, but aims to take it one step further with, in the case of say flight bookings, some "Wolfram Alpha"-like charts and graphs, adding extra value and search result relevancy. So, what do the search results actually look like compared to Google, and does it look like Bing will win, or just wing it? Please read on to page 3. |
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