Announced a few days ago, now it is available to the public: Microsoft started their new search at Bing.com.
It looks very similar to Google and offers similar functionalities: you can search for Websites, Images, Videos, Shopping, News, Maps, etc.
Mobile
When browsing the site with my Android G1 there was no mobile version of the site available, so I had to stick with the large site on my small screen.
Search Results
I did some initial searches for obvious stuff: I searched for Krahn or Christian Krahn in order to find my blog(s). The german version was no problem but I had difficulties finding krahn.org. One reason is that Bing forces you to use search results connected to your geographic location (which is germany for me) but my english blog is hosted with an .org domain, so Bing might think it’s not relevant to me. Well, wrong in my case.
Another thing I searched for is “Branchenbuch” (english translation would be “industry directory” directory, but more likely “yellow pages”). Obviously Bing uses other characteristics to rank pages, as the webpage of my employe klicktel.de is only being found on page 2 on Bling while being on the top results on Google. Guess that means more work for our SEO guys to find out how to improve “Bing rank“.
Maps
First thing that was strange is Bing Maps is not working in the Chrome browser. Hopefully that will be fixed soon. Other than that the maps implementation is similar to other sites like Google Maps or klicktel.de, map material is a bit out of date as on all the other sites. I like the implementation of the eagle view perspective on their site as the images seems to be a bit more up to date and you can pan to the next area and it automatically updates the image to that area. That’s something currently not possible in the klickTel version.
Other stuff
I will do some more checking on the other features. Currently it seems to me that Microsoft just made a copy of the current Google features (frontend) with their own backend behind it. Another thing that leads to that opinion is that Bing.com has the same spots for ads like Google (with AdWords).
Let’s see how it developes…