To Bing or Not to Bing

Should you ditch your favourite search engine and move over to Bing? Probably not - and here is why, from a user experience point of view.

The problem is that there is nothing in the Bing experience that makes me say "Yes! This is what was missing in Google Search." or "Wow, this is an awesome new way of presenting search results". Bing does not enhance my search experience. I do not see any value in using Bing over my current default, Google.

All too often usefulness is not paid its due attention when the user experience is being designed. Bing is just another example of such behavior. A usability test of an early prototype, which might have probed participants on the usefulness of the system, would have revealed this fact. Alternatively, a focus group early in the design process (during the requirement gathering phase for instance) would have clued the Bing team into which features they needed to incorporate into their system, in order to convert users from Google Search to their product. You can have a product that is easy/fun/enjoyable to use, but if it serves no use, you got a problem (your marketing team needs to really step up to the plate to convince users to buy into your product!).

The encouraging part of this all is that Microsoft did a good job with Bing when you compare it to Live.com, their previous attempt at making gains in the online search industry. You get way more relevant (useful) results with Bing than you could with Live (which is now dead). You can trust Bing more than you could trust Live to show you the best possible search results.

In fact, for the most part, I was able to find what I was looking for when I used Bing. But Bing does not give me anything that Google does not.

There were a few aspects of the search experience that differed between the two. For example, if you spell a search term incorrectly, Google prominently displays a sign asking you whether you meant the correct spelling. Bing has this functionality too, but displays the message as a tiny sentence at the very top of the page. I actually didn't notice the functionality until a few days into my Bing experimentation, which was unfortunate because I am helplessly addicted to my search engine, not me, worrying about my spellings. On the other hand, one aspect of Bing that I prefer when compared to Google is how it displays its video search results. In Bing, you can hover your mouse over a video thumbnail for the video to start playing. This makes it much faster for me to find the video I am looking for. I do not have to open multiple pages, one at the time, and return to the search result page each time I open the wrong video. Nor do I need to click on a "play" button for each video. Displaying video results in this fashion is novel and exciting ... and makes me want to use Bing, not Google, when I search for videos. But how often do I search for videos on a search engine? Almost never. I usually go straight to YouTube and search for the video there.

So what does Bing bring to my table? Its front page has a stunning photograph as the background, which changes each day. Embedded in the photograph are 4 hidden links to sample Bing searches on topics related to the photograph. The 4 searches cover a video search, image search, text search and a repeat of one of the three categories. This is a fun game to play ("find the hidden links and see what they lead to!") but it distracts me from my primary goal ("Bing! Stop tempting me to waste time! I already know what your video/image/web searches look like. I only came here to search for a pasta recipe.") and, more importantly, I normally use the built in search field in my browser, which means I almost never visit the search engine's front page. Most browsers today are integrating search into the address bar, in addition to having a dedicated search field - not to mention the plethora of toolbars with integrated search that users currently use. The trend seems to be for people to move away from visiting the search engine's homepage and to instead use the browser's integrated search functionality. Is Microsoft hoping for a reverse in this trend?

Other than its pretty home page, Bing looks quite similar to Google. Crucially, its search results are displayed quite similarly - a list of links, each with a short description. There isn't anything unique about Bing that makes me want to give up the reliability I get with Google (they clearly addressed the fact that people are already familiar with Google's UI and might find the idea of a new UI daunting - they created a very similar UI to that of Google's).

Perhaps Bing was Microsoft's response to its Live.com user base bleeding away to Google. In that sense, Bing should be a success. It is strong enough to hold its own and should stem the "default" users from making the effort to switch to something new.

Unfortunately it isn't of much use to users who are already satisfied with Google. I won't be changing my default search engine to Bing anytime soon.