As you say, the search and ranking algorithms do seem to be different though; unfortunately we can no longer compare and contrast as Live.com now redirects to Bing! You give an interesting example, and Phil Bradley has also spotted some oddities. It appears that Bing could be censoring results for the UK. See his blog posting Bing excluding results form UK version? at http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2009/06/bing-excluding-results-from-uk-version.html

On the display number of hits display, I don’t believe that it is about the time it takes to display a 100. The image results list is a continuous scroll: you just keep scrolling down and down and down and down until your reach the end of the list, although I suspect that there must be an upper limit on this. And that displays quickly enough. I still use Google for many of my searches because I use Firefox with the CustomizeGoogle add-on. That can be set up to stream search results so that you just keep scrolling down through the results beyond the usual maximum of 100.

It will be interesting to see if the promised developments take place, or if Bing is just left to fester as Live was. Microsoft have come up with some really good services in the past for example Academic Live and Live Books. Both were worthy competitors to Google’s offerings and far superior but Microsoft axed them. Not a good track record.

One difference i noticed is that URLs with the search terms used seem to come higher than other sites – so, for example, AWARE’s web-site came to the top for a search on “marketing-intelligence”. Also relevant is that the algorithm is sufficiently intelligent to realise that CompetitorAnalysis.com is a likely candidate for searches on Competitor Analysis. I’m not sure the same exists in Google.

Another odd feature is that some titles seem to be edited. For example some searches on my web-site content bring up the following title: Read an Article On Competitor Analysis On the Aware Website. This title doesn’t exist on my web-site and has been taken from the link heading on the government’s BusinessLink web-site.

There are some interesting field-codes for advanced searching on Bing that i’m not familiar with on Google – that could prove useful. In particular contains: for looking for sites holding particular types of content (e.g. MP3 files) but other interesting options include those for finding RSS feeds (hasfeed: and feed:) as well as the loc: term for location searching. (Not tried it on towns yet so i don’t know how accurate it is).

What i don’t like is that the number of hits you can get if you change the preferences is only 50 – unlike Google’s 100. Why limit it to 50 – it can’t be a fear that it takes too long to display 100 values, or can it?

Karen

Don’t get me wrong! I’m not saying the US version is any better, just that it seems odd to link to another brand name, confusing the users. Honestly I am actually quite confused to as what is new with Bing. Live had shopping, the same image format etc. My honest guess would be that people have not tried Live and now just getting round to tying this ‘new’ engine, with no baises to see what is new and what is old.

Daniel.

I wondered where I had heard Ciao mentioned. That’s cleared up one mystery. I had a look at the US version of Bing and was equally unimpresssed – perhaps it is just that my type of searches don’t bring out the best in Bing I’ve seen people raving about the general search results and the way that one can continuously scroll the image results, but these were the same in Live.com! If nothing else, all this media hype has encouraged people to try out Microsoft’s search engine, which for some of my research type queries sometimes comes up with unique and better results than Google.

Karen

Bing is intresting, not least because it’s odd for Microsoft to push something out so quickly. Rather like the did with Live they tend to have another domain where people can test it out first. I think what you’ve encountered with the UK version is the fact it’s not done for the UK yet.

They don’t actually mention that the sites they are redirecting are only a temp thing! If you visit http://www.bing.com/?scope=web&setmkt=en-US&setlang=SET_NULL&uid=1D62FD46&FORM=W5WA then search for a product, say an iPod then click shopping again you will get the Bing style.

I love new search engines coming to the market. It always give me a buzz to try and push MSE360.com forward, and I don’t think that could be a bad thing?

Ciao rings a bell in the back of my mind, but whether it is an alarm bell or a celebration bell I’m not sure.

I see that live.com now redirects to Bing but the help files are still on Live!