It's easy to hate Microsoft. It's especially easy to laugh off their latest foray into the search world considering their wasted billions to date. But, their latest effort is actually kind of good...in some ways better than Google.
To start, image search. As you scroll down, new results auto-load, essentially giving one an infinite page of results rather than a page-by-page list. This is a great feature, as its often easier to scroll down a page for 30 seconds and eyeball a couple hundred images rather than page through numerous pages of results (which, after a few pages, most users give up on and try a new search).
As a pro-blogger who spends an inordinate amount of time hunting down obscure images of hipster-happy obscure bands and such, this is something I'm looking forward to using quite a bit.
Video search is another nice one. Mousing over a result will trigger the playback of excerpts from the video in full motion, with sound. This tops the functionality of YouTube itself. It also beats the shoddy animated GIF frame previews seen on some *Tube clone sites.
This can be really useful when hunting down videos...I'm actually pretty impressed by this feature.
Other than that it is, like most search engines, a somewhat commoditized property. The web results, news, etc seem at least on par with the other major search engines, but being "good enough" won't be sufficient to break the emotional bonds many people have formed with the Google brand.
Will the new image and video features do the trick? Or the nine-figure advertising deal with JWT? Hard to say...competing with a brand that has evolved into a verb is tough. Many users so instinctively go to Google that MSFT will need to pull off a sustained assault over time to remind people over and over and over again that there are other, possibly better, options out there.
Leave a comment