Microsoft's Bing: 5 Features that give it a shot against Google

CIO - Microsoft made Bing, its new "decision engine," publicly available yesterday with a background image of hot air balloons lifting off in the countryside on the Bing homepage.

It's a fitting image given Microsoft's desire to lift search off what it considers the ground level. In a speech last week at the unveiling of Bing, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called current search one-dimensional and said Bing will help people "find information quickly and use the information they've found to accomplish tasks."

The software giant plans to do this by categorizing results according to best match and not popularity, and also by pulling related searches and information that's buried in a site onto the results page. Microsoft vows to display more information on the page in a more organized way than the competition (i.e. Google).

Google is a dominant force in search, with a market share of 64%, according to comScore's April search rankings.

If Microsoft has any chance of reducing Google's lead, it will be through Bing's organization of information and images on the results pages and by helping people find local restaurants, book flights, shop for a digital camera or find treatments for the flu better than Google.

Also, aggressive marketing will help. Microsoft plans to invest close to $100 million in an advertising campaign for Bing.

But what are the specific features on which Microsoft is banking its search, excuse me, "decision" future? Here are five features that Microsoft hopes will make Bing a household verb.

Explorer Pane

To show more information on the results page, Microsoft uses what's called an Explorer Pane in Bing. It's a navigation menu that runs down the left hand column of the page that offers different categories depending on your search. For example, if your search word is "Boston", in addition to the list of links on the main page, automated categories appear in the Explorer Pane such as Map, Tourism, Attractions, Restaurants, Weather and Images. If the search term is "Barack Obama", the categories under the Explorer Pane are Images, Biography, Family, Library, Interview and Timeline.

Underneath these so-called Quick Tabs in the Explorer Pane are subcatgories "Related Searches" and a "Search History" of your most recent search terms.

Categorized Search Results

Another feature meant to keep searches organized is Bing's categorized search results, which takes the categories from the Explorer Pane and uses them as headings to break up the search results on the center page into groups.

A search for Barack Obama returns images across the top accompanied by what Bing thinks are the most relevant links below. These links are not sorted or categorized. But the links below that are grouped into sections with the headers Barack Obama's Biography, Barack Obama's Family, Barack Obama's Library, Barack Obama's Interview, Barack Obama's Timeline. These headers a clickable and link to additional sites related to the subject.