San Francisco — Software monopolist Microsoft Corp. is making Bing soothing to the eyes, and hopefully easier to use, on Wednesday unveiled a swathe of updates to Bing.com, like integration with GrubHub and OpenTable, and a slew of new mobile, local, travel and social-media features for Bing in an attempt to make the search engine more competitive, hoping that better packaging will help it eat away search-industry leader Google’s online dominance.
At the Bing Search Summit held at Microsoft’s downtown San Francisco offices, the company previewed some of the more prudent way to search for things like music, events, movies, and images from its search results, as well as improvements to the things people are able to do from Bing’s results page and the Bing mobile app.
The updates will roll out over the next few weeks, which is part of an effort to tempt more users to a product that still dawdles far behind industry leader Google Inc.
Microsoft’s senior vice president of research and development, Satya Nadella, comprehensively explained on how much hard-work the Bing team puts into making the search engine more aesthetically engaging.”We are head-to-head in terms of search quality,” said Nadella.”Why would an end user, if you are head to head on search quality, use Bing? That is the question we ask ourselves every day.”
The response the company is counting on is a combination of a attractive interface, results informed by what your friends think, and focusing on helping people do things faster, whether that is finding a product review or buying an airline ticket. And probably the most significant, and exclusive, update is the expansion of a partnership with Facebook, the new feature aimed at social media fans is the option to rank search results based on what a Bing user’s friends have “liked” on Facebook.
“Even if only a tiny percentage of queries have moments where the social graph informs and improves search results, it is a huge difference,” Nadella said, adding that it is only the beginning of using social sites like Facebook to improve search.
Wednesday’s announcements includes 400 “unique visual experiences” built into Bing, each of which gets served up based on the action, along with a new mobile app for Android and the iPhone, that brings some of the design feel of Windows Phone 7 to their competitors’ devices, besides some nifty maps, real time bus directions, and an easy way to make beautiful panoramas. You can also easily make reservations via OpenTable and take a virtual tour of a restaurant’s interior when a restaurant shows up in map search results.
“The core of our work addresses the fact that the web is getting more complex and faceted — not less,” Nadella, wrote in a blog post.
The company also updated its Bing mobile apps — for smart phones such as the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7 handsets — that empowers enable users to make reservations using the popular OpenTable inc.’s service without leaving Bing or order takeout using Grubhub, all from within the app.
Once checked into a restaurant using OpenTable, a Bing app user can then “check in” at the restaurant using social-media location services such as Foursquare and Facebook Places. These updates to Bing’s mobile iOS and Android apps align the browser closer to Google. Bing for Mobile has also partnered with Grubhub to provide faster restaurant search results based on select criteria.
Bing has also minimized the effort it takes to search with Instant Answer, which draws up a collage of potentially relevant images upon a search.
“Instead of making you qualify that you are looking for (Casablanca, Morocco or Casablanca, the movie), we have organized the tabs so that one simple click gets you to what exactly you are looking for,” explained Jamil Valliani in a blog post.
Microsoft also redesigned its browser-based image search and maps, reducing the latter’s reliance on the Silverlight plug-in and instead doing more with the power of modern browsers and HTML5, adding things like infinite scrolling, and something called smart tabs, which is a set of related image searches that sit on the top of the page. Clicking these begins another image search without taking you off the page:
Bing’s enhanced image search. (Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)
Real-time public transportation information has also been included in to the Bing apps. The travel info will inform users if a bus or train is running early, on time or delayed, and the app can offer predictions for arrival times.
Currently, transit routes for 11 metropolitan areas are live including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Vancouver. More cities will be added in the future.
Another important feature that is not available yet in-Bing-app results pages involves a partnership with Fansnap to help people buy ticket for sports games and other events using a service called FanSnap. So say you are searching for an upcoming basketball game at a local stadium. Bing will now serve up a stadium map, and a listing of the tickets you can buy, straight from the results:
Ticket sales inside of Bing search results. (Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)
One exceptionally good new search result that Microsoft demonstrated, but which is not yet live, is for movies that are no longer playing in theaters. The Movie page for that movie will, like those for in-theater movies, show you a preview and links to reviews. But it substitutes direct, deep links to places to watch the movie online, including Netflix, for the typical showtime listings.
The new features come as Microsoft attempts to make the well-reviewed Bing search engine more popular with users. Despite an aggressive advertising campaign, Bing has failed to make significant inroads with Internet searchers, who routinely default to Google’s dominant search engine.
These upcoming features, in addition to the ones being made to Bing’s browser search are being unfurled over in the next few weeks.