Review on Google's new competitor Microsoft Bing

Factor Zero June 03, 2009

The new search engine Bing by Microsoft is live now in its beta testing mode.The news of this search engine was all over the internet from the past few weeks and it was unveiled by Steve Ballmer,CEO,Microsoft on 28th May,2009 and went live on June 1st 2009.

Bing now replaces the Live Search which was the search engine by Microsoft.The ultimate question of the user community after(and before) the release is that "Will Bing dethrone the ultimate search engine Google?"

The Bing home page has a search box wrapped up in an image which looks pretty much like the Ask home page.The search is offered in different media like Web,Images,Videos,News,Maps and more. The search result page is a 3 column page with the middle and the right column displaying search results and relavant ads respectively.The search result might also display few sponsored links at the top.Before you go to the wrong conclusion that Bing is similar to Google,Bing has an extra left pane called as the Explore pane which includes Quick Tabs, Related Searches and Search History.The advanced search has similar fields provided by other search engines.

Bing uses the "Ranking using the Neural Net technology" which is very often called as the RankNet unlike Google which displays the search results based on Pagerank technique. An Artificial Neural Network(ANN),referred as Neural Net is a model developed on the basis of human neural network.The Neural net technique is a self learning technique because we never derive any mathematical relation between output and input,but simply train the network that learns by itself making the output relavant.More on the RankNet technique here.

This RankNet is trained everytime with the user's query and click on the result.For example,if a user searches for "How does Bing work?" and he clicks on the 4th link in the result page,Bing trains the network to show that result at the top.This doesn't mean that next time you search for the same thing,you get the clicked link as the top result.The RankNet is trained according to the query and the click in a most general way rather than for a particular search making the search engine more relavant.The RankNet was trained with thousands of data samples before Bing went live(or Live became Bing) and will be continually trained with more searches being performed now by a more wide and variant audience.This makes Bing "Superfresh" by updating itselef each time.Bing also provides a document preview reducing wasted trips to sites you weren't looking for.

Google's Pagerank of a website is dependant on the incoming links to that website and the importance of the website linking to it while Bing uses a technology that improves itself using the search engine.We have to wait and see if this innovative technology will beat Google in the coming years.

Bing represents the sound of arrival or decision making or discovery .A most suitable Acronym of Bing that should be making rounds is But Its Not Google.Thanks to Amit Agarwal.