If it’s going to compete against Google, Bing does need something different. Microsoft is trying to do it by integrating machine-generated videos, from Qwiki, a service that generates multimedia presentations for various types of information, as announced officially today. For now, this will only happen where a Wikipedia entry is present (and only for some of them, according to my attempts), but it should be extended in the future. Basically, you’ll get a video presentation summarizing a lot of info about the respective topic, and the videos are well-made. For example, when I search for Axl Rose instead of getting this from Google…
I can get this feature and media rich presentation (delivered in a female computer voice…).
And the groovy part is that all of the content in the presentation is clickable, taking the user to various bits and pieces of information. In order to see the Qwiki associated with a Wikipedia entry, just click the Play symbol under the respective result.
I especially like the “related searches” list that gives me the option of adding more criteria with a click. I confess I started using Bing because of the rewards program (yeah, I can get A’zon gift cards, Tango cards, etc. just for using Bing). Nice that the advertisers aren’t the only ones who can get paid. But a little incentive never hurt anyone. ;-) They’ve gone big on connecting with your facebook friends so that if you’re shopping for a new gadget, you can get friends recommendations… I blow off the log in with facebook, but do log in with my Windows Live ID to rack up rewards points. Sign in or not, they have a search history (you can shut it down if you want) that I find really really helpful. Have you ever visited a site and 3 days later want to find it again? Search history not only keeps a list of your recent search criteria, but which links you clicked from each search. You might also notice that paid search results (advertisers) are relegated to a neat little column on the side rather than filling the first 2 or three screens of your results. No more “Buy ATI radeon drivers at Walmart.” BTW, this reply was personalized just for you. ;-) Comment
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