Friday, May 11, 2012

Bing Emphasizes Algorithmic Search, Social Ties With Update

In what may be a true opening for Microsoft's Bing search engine to gain some market share, Bing said Thursday that it has released a newly redesigned version of its service. Responding to widespread criticism of competitor Google's push to force its Google+ social network onto its users, Bing launched a new interface which emphasizes the firm's algorithmic searches, while still providing access to social search results and social networking sites such as Facebook. Bing said the launch is the "most significant update" to the search engine since its launch three years ago, explaining how it did an test between versions of Google and Bing on users to track preferences, showing that users preferred its new search results 43 percent to Google's 28 percent. Bing has taken a radically different approach from Google, which now automatically presents users with searches tuned to their connections and friends; Bing instead provides both algorithmic and social searches via separate columns, making social searches always available but "never intrusive", moving most of the social content it provides into a separate section of the page. The new design changes may give Bing a chance to claw back some significant market share back from Google, as Google's push to "unify" its services and force users to use Google+ instead of social networks like Facebook have caused uproar among some users.