Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 01 June 2009 19:11
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
One feature that doesn’t yet appear to be activated is the “hotspots” on the photo featured on the front page of Bing.
This photo is meant to change once per day, but in this high period of interest on what is effectively the official launch day, Microsoft appears to be changing it regularly, just to keep things interesting for everyone.
No doubt the extra “zing” of the hotspots being activated will come later – as will some of the movie times, public transport details, airport plane departure and arrival details right at the top of a search, travel and accommodation pricing prediction, general price comparison and cashback, and more in countries other than the US.
Most of the features I’ve just listed are available to US users using the US version of Bing.com, and that information simply hasn’t been fully and completely collected for most other countries yet.
As NineMSN, the custodians of Bing (alongside Microsoft) in Australia, noted that similar features would come within 6 to 12 to 18 months to Australian users as the data is collected and the deals presumably all worked out, something that would likely be a similar timeframe for other major countries.
Bing also does very well with image and video search. With images, the results a continuous scrolling list, as opposed to a set amount of results per page, but you can refine the results to get specific image quality, size and other metrics.
Video results are still broken up into separate pages, but you can do nifty things like specificy video length, size, whether it has people in it, among a range of other cool breakdowns of the search results.
Video search results also automatically play a preview when you run your mouse cursor onto one, adding a bit of eye candy-ish wow factor to the fun of a new search results experience.
But is all of this enough to dethrone the great Google?
Please… read on to page 3!
