With this release we’ve created a modern Bing.com experience – one that is faster, cleaner and more visually appealing. We believe that search can be beautiful as well as functional and efficient. With that as our goal, we evaluated fonts, spacing, color, visual scan patterns, the search box and even the underlying code.
My problem with this and recent moves by Google: when I do a regular search, I do not want my search results to be spammed by news, picture, and video results. Bing seems to follow in Google’s footsteps by adding irrelevant crap to search results for the sake of looking cool, but at the cost of usability.
I mean, check this screenshot. How much of the page is reserved for actual search results, and not pictures, info boxes, news items, and god knows what else?
Exactly: none.
The problem, of course, is that Google and Microsoft want you to think of Google Search/Bing as destinations in their own right, rather than a means to an end. That’s why they insist on adding tons of “content”. It’s understandable why they would want this, but as you say, clearly no thought about what users want in search engine.
Bit of an irony.
Didn’t Yahoo! lose to Google back in the early days because they were trying the exact same kind of nonsense Google and Bing are now doing?
Edited 2013-09-18 00:39 UTC
Nonsense, if you go to google.com you are still greeted with a rather clean and spartan white page, not with a web-site-as-an-aggregate mess.
Until you search for anything that is.
But in Google’s case the “mess” is all directly related to your search, which is much more preferable.
Actually, I do get good search results with ddg, but you have to learn to be less verbose. It reminds me a bit of old Google, how any irrelevant word could skew your search results before they started filtering common words out of your search. E.g. If I’m searching for something specific such as an iOS 7 jailbreak, that’s what I put into ddg. Not “how to jailbreak iOS 7” or “working jailbreak for iPhone 5S.” Be specific, and direct to the point and you’ll most often find what you’re looking for quickly with it.
Of course, sometimes I can’t use it as I do searches in both German and Swedish as well as English. For foreign language searches, ddg is absolutely useless at this point as it only handles English. Hopefully they’ll expand to other languages in time. Until then, I do still have to go to Google for those.
Hey! The results returned for those search terms are not very useful.
I use Google a lot. Search for proper information, and get proper information. Search for Kate Perry, and get a bunch of spam. Seems like Bing works the same way, to be honest.
… and then I get my results in a relatively well organized manner, with an unobtrusive sidebar of suggested products I could be interested in which I tend to ignore.
Bing is a bit more cluttered but not too bad either.
But I assume some of you won’t be happy until either google or bing take you for a nice steak dinner and show you some good time out and around town before tucking you into bed, after typing a query.
Edited 2013-09-18 16:15 UTC
Well, the first one to pay for a nice Sushi dinner will win my loyalty.
i know it’s a redundant reply, but i just scrolled down to make exactly the same comment. Yahoo got slammed for the crap they had on their pages.
I’d imagine most people searching for “Katy Perry” either want pictures or videos, and not a wiki article, and I’d imagine the same is true for any pop-culture icon. If you do a search for something else, it’s much, much more results focused.
For example:
http://tinyurl.com/lp74ggv
Only problem is, It’s impossible to tell which are sponsored links or not.
You only have one chance to make a good first impression.
Google’s “start page’ used to be very simple – just a text entry box. Over time it has acquired all sorts of irritating behavior – text box jumping around the screen, unrequested drop-down menus suggesting useless information and distracting from one’s typing … blech!
Bing has its own irritants – unwanted panoramic images, and now popup links to news articles. More blech!
A while ago I grabbed a snapshot of Google’s start page when it was simple, and I have it bookmarked as my main page for search. Very predictable and peaceful. Irritation gone.
Regarding search results – as long as I can figure out what is paid advertising and what is a genuine search result, that’s OK. On rare occassion I actually want those paid adverts …
Edited 2013-09-18 01:21 UTC
While this is true, I can’t think of the last time I actually went to Bing.com or Google.com and used the search page. All of the browsers I use either have a dedicated search box or allow you to search from the URL bar.
DDG is great at this; I have it as the default engine in my search bar, and use !g or !wiki for traditional searches, or !bimages since Bing is better at image results than Google.
Switched my homepage/search engine to Duck Duck Go a few weeks ago, love it. Search results are relevant again!
Bing becomes Bling.
Welcome to the club. I’ve been using the term ‘Bling’ for several years.
Well then you are not very smart… For Bing has been far less “Blingy” than Google for several years now…
ZING!
you misspelled “lame” ;-P
What came as a surprise to me is that MS is still trying…
Just imagine the kind of infrastructure that MS needs to keep Bing running just to remain irrelevant. It must cost millions per month.
Edited 2013-09-18 01:46 UTC
And Bing spawned Azure which is a billion dollar venture. Investments pay off.
Then why didn’t they just do the classic Google interface then?
Who knew design talk is always full of shit?
Yeah, if they went back to the original Google’s page that might’ve gotten a few extra users.
The keyword is ‘modern’ as in shitty Windows 8 “Modern UI” style.
I think the keyword is actually “experience”. When people use vague words and sprinkle them liberally, you know they’re just trying to sound authoritative without being so.
Okay…so which search engine currently sucks the least of the ones out there?
It depends on your criteria.
In the sense of the best search “engine” strictly speaking, nobody can hold a candle to Google. Its results are still uncannily relevant, thorough, and varied.
However, in terms of presentation of search results, I agree with others that Google has regressed considerably as of late. My personal pet peeve has to do with the link to cached results. It used to always be in the same horizontal location for all results. Now it requires clicking on a little down arrow that is immediately after the URL (which varies in length, so the location is no longer consistent) and then clicking on the popup menu item.
DuckDuckGo has a nice presentation, but its results, like those of Bing, still leave a lot to be desired. Google seems to be the only one that has figured out giving higher priority to the root index page of a top level domain instead of a random subpage as the first result.
Except they aren’t, because Google now takes into consideration your location, language and whatever else they use as input.
As result, as a polyglot person living abroad, I need to always change the Google domain, depending on what I am searching for.
For example, a search query in Germany will return different results than with the Portuguese version of Google.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a long time now and have no regrets. About the only thing I go to Google for is image searching. I’ll admit it took a few days to retrain my brain.
“I mean, check this screenshot. How much of the page is reserved for actual search results, and not pictures, info boxes, news items, and god knows what else?”
You miss the point. Search is merely an advertising opportunity. From Microsoft’s view the results should be cluttered by as little actual content as possible.
It’s only the <strike>suckers</strike> users who would want it otherwise.
I really don’t see what is wrong with that bing screenshot of a katy perry search. You probably would want to quick bio, a link to a few of her popular songs and where to buy them.
“This function is not yet available in your country or region”
They never change.
Is this just my opinion or iOS apps now try to mimic Android counter part.
The irony is that in the beginning it was the other way around, using custom buttons and other GUI elements just to mimic iOS on Android.
Sorry, wrong news
. Ignore it.
http://www.bing.com/blogs/
Says it all really
Funny, when I do exactly the same search (which I wouldn’t normally) I a couple screen’s worth of search results on the first page. Successive pages almost entirely search results.
Maybe the problem is searching on a tablet or device without sufficient screen resolution to show more than the top few results.