Microsoft Takes Users Behind Bing

Microsoft has launched a new site for Bing, where users can go to find out the latest features that have been implemented into the search engine (excuse me, "decision engine"). The site's called Behind Bing.

"You can see each feature in action though a screencast, see me talk about why we did it the way we did (for those who like to geek out), and get some drill-down details," says Bing's Stefan Weitz. "For those of you pressed for time, check out 'Features for You' at the bottom of the site which highlights some features that I thought were especially cool depending on what and where you are."

Highlighted on the site currently are sections looking at:

- Real-time search
- Bing Local
- Weather/Event results
- Enhanced Results
- Enhanced hover
- Bing for mobile
- Videos
- Bing Travel
- Bing Health
- Visual Search
- Bing Shopping
- Wolfram Alpha
- Search Sharing
- Reference

There are videos and other sections for "explore," "overview," and "insight guide." If you don't regularly keep up with Bing's announcements or search news in general, this should serve as a good place to check out from time to time just to see what the search engine has been up to, and to stay informed about any functionalities that you may have otherwise missed. That will of course require that Microsoft keeps it updated. 

On a related note, all of the features that Bing announced last week are supposed to be "100%" live now for all users, but that doesn't seem to be accurate, as I am not able to access some of the new stuff yet.

Have You Read This?

> Bing Gets a Bunch of New Search Features

> Yahoo and Microsoft May Be Close to Signing

> Some Bing Users Seeing Latest Posts on Publisher Searches

StumbleUpon Integrating More Social Aspects Into Redesign

Earlier this month, StumbleUpon started showcasing their new homepage design, when they touted their “Google + Twitter” social search. Now they’ve gone through the rest of the site to make it more consistent (less customizable), easy to understand and streamlined.

Read Write Web reports:

The new interface is streamlined and more social with an updated relationship system. A focus on consistency (e.g., limiting user control of visual elements) and removal of clutter (e.g., presenting tags in a drop-down menu rather than a cloud) characterize the design changes made. Also, a few tweaks to group sharing were made to help reduce share-spam.

The most significant UX changes have occur[r]ed in the way friendships and subscriptions work on the site.

Now, your friends are you “Mutual Subscribers,” which makes the relationship a little clearer. They’re the people users can share pages with directly from the toolbar.

However, the redesign is largely changes like those—clarifying various site functions, streamlining the design, making things easier for users. The homepage, same as the beta featured earlier this month, highlights recent activity from Mutual Subscribers—but doesn’t place a big emphasis on the social search aspect they were talking about earlier this month.

So is StumbleUpon shying away from that? Or are they worried that their core user base was confused? I know I was a little worried when I first hear the social search news—even though I’m now an infrequent Stumbler, I didn’t want to lose that original “discovery engine,” even if it would be for a working social search model. However, the actual stumbling part of the service would remain—and maybe this is just to remind and reassure their users of that.

But it still seems like they haven’t really played up the social search aspect enough. While I remain highly skeptical of social search, it’s one of those brass rings for mainstream search engines—like Google, which announced Social Search in Labs, using sites that your Google contacts have viewed, as well as sites you’ve seen before in your Web History, Google Reader and associated Google services.

However, with StumbleUpon’s more targeted “Mutual Subscribers” option, you have the ability to control what friends you’re getting information from, instead of results from everyone you’ve ever emailed.

What do you think? Does StumbleUpon have a better chance of getting social search right? Is it shying away from that—and should it, now that Google’s officially thrown its hat into the ring?

Comments

Microhoo Deal Not the Only Piece of Significant Search News

Yahoo and Microsoft intend for their freshly announced search advertising deal to be completed in early 2010. That's not too far away, and in that deal, Bing will become the algorithmic search used by Yahoo. At that point, Bing becomes the clear competitor to Google in straight up search.

As Microsoft and Yahoo get the majority of the spotlight, however, let's not overlook the fact that Twitter just redesigned its own homepage, and guess what it looks like...a search engine.

Industry analysts have been frequently citing Twitter's real-time search as something of a threat to Google. Obviously, Twitter Search doesn't begin to embody the essence of what Google search or any other traditional search engine has to offer, but it has highlighted the relevance of a new kind of search, and it is frankly just one that is lacking on those traditional engines. You can search Google or Twitter for topical information related to a news story, but you can always get the most recent discussion on Twitter. There are other real time search engines out there, but Twitter has the users.

Google has of course acknowledged that they need real-time search in their own mix, and it's likely only a matter of time before that happens. Over the weekend, Matt Cutts pointed out that Google "keeps getting fresher." He pointed to a tweet that was indexed after an hour. That's close, but not quite real-time.

But back to Twitter. Lots of people know about Twitter search already. It's not like it's a brand new feature. However, you have to assume that lots of people don't know about it too. At this point, you're still lucky if someone you're involved in a conversation with in the physical world even understands what Twitter is, let alone that it has a search feature, and that that search feature provides results in real time.

Twitter's new homepage puts that search feature right in you face. When a new user comes along to discover Twitter for the first (or even second or third) time, they'll see that search box. They'll say to themselves, "What is this? I thought Twitter was just some pointless way to tell people what I am having for breakfast. It's a search engine now?" Then they will start to understand that there is more to gain from Twitter than what they previously thought.

Don't get me wrong. There will still be plenty who don't care, search engine or no search engine. But it will be interesting to see if more people begin to use Twitter for their searching needs. No, it's not going to replace Google, but for some, it might replace Google for x-amount of their searches - the searches where a Twitter search makes sense.

Twitter's new homepage is one of the interesting pieces in the search puzzle this year. And that puzzle is getting more interesting very quickly. Do you think Twitter will continue to play a more significant role in people's search habits? Share your thoughts.